When I talk to business owners about taking good care of their customers, and about maximizing their relationships, some of them seem to think that satisfying the customer’s requirements and providing great service requires Herculean efforts on the part of themselves and their staffs. The truth is that, most of the time, giving customers a service experience that will keep them coming back isn’t hard at all; in fact, I’m convinced that sometimes, it’s harder to provide bad service than good.
Case in point – I was recently at one of the popular “casual dining” restaurants for dinner. The name isn’t important; most of the things I’m about to talk about are interchangeable. Now, when I’m eating at one of these places, I don’t expect to be dazzled. Just bring me my burger/fajitas/salad/pasta/etc., keep the drink glasses full, and I’m a pretty happy guy. As, I’m guessing, are most of you when you eat at these restaurants. Unfortunately, that was too much to ask on this night.
The waiter managed our chips and salsa and drink orders OK. Then he took our food orders, and as is the custom in entirely too many of these places, he did so by memory, without writing anything down. Apparently, he was a mite too busy for his memory to be really effective, because 10 minutes later, he came back, verified my wife’s order, and asked, “uh, what did you have?” I restated my order, and he apologized profusely and explained that he was “very busy with all the people coming in.” Yep, that would be called the “dinner rush.”
Once upon a time, when waiters came to take your order, they used a little pad and pen, and WROTE THINGS DOWN. Amazingly, when waiters write things down, my orders come out correctly more often than not. When not, it appears to be something of a crapshoot. The problem isn’t limited to restaurants, though; in my career, when I’ve seen customer service screw-ups, they are more often than not caused by faulty memory (with a lack of data recording) rather than by too much data recording.
Think about your own business. How many people are involved in the fulfillment of each order? How much of your order fulfillment process is communicated on paper, and how much is verbal? We’ve all seen the exercise where one person whispers a phrase to someone, who repeats it to the next person, and by about the fifth person, the phrase is completely different. If you rely too much on memory and verbal communication, that’s your order process.
It’s worse in selling and relationship development. The average salesperson will interact with anywhere from 10 to 50 customers per week. If that salesperson is making face to face calls on a customer once per month, he will have had anywhere between 40 and 200 sales calls between calls on that one particular customer; if he relies strictly on memory for important details about the relationship, he’d better have a Guinness World Record level memory.
As a customer, I can tell you that few things are as frustrating as having to backtrack and cover old ground with salespeople who are forever one step behind in relationship development. Frankly, those salespeople usually find themselves on the outside looking in. So you won’t be one of those people, here are some quick techniques to help you excel in service and relationship development:
- Take good notes on every customer interaction. It all begins here. First of all, studies show that we are more likely to remember that which we write down, and secondly, once written down, it’s captured for posterity – details and all.
- Have a database and use it. The most important details should be recorded in a database format – programs like ACT and Goldmine are cheap enough now that there’s no excuse for NOT using them.
- When details change, communicate – IN WRITING or data – to everyone who affects the customer. Knowing that your customer will now only accept shipments on Tuesday is great; if the shipping clerk doesn’t know, it’s a problem. And as I noted, don’t just communicate verbally – take the time to send an e-mail, write a memo, etc.
- Archive your notes. I discovered a long time ago that if I attempted to retype every note from every sales call into my own database, I’d do little else (I’m a prodigious note-taker). However, I can scan those pages to a document, place that document in an archive folder, and link it to the customer’s record – with a note or two in the database about what is in the note pages. That preserves them for all time, and it’s a lot handier than the “pile of old legal pads” filing system that a lot of us have used.
If this column seems a bit elementary, I’m fine with that; providing great customer service is often elementary. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough. If you resemble this remark, maybe it’s time to revise some things.
