Customer Service Skills | Customer Care | Make Customers Feel Special
Convert the ordinary into the extraordinary. Do something special for a customer today.
Five extra words such as “Really nice to see you” can make a customer feel special. The sparkle in your eyes can have an equal effect. In fact, there are at least 100 opportunities every day to make customers feel special.
Before she retired, Mary used to work in a call center. She comments: “Every evening as I went home I challenged myself to think of something special I had done for my customers that day. It’s all about giving something extra to your customers.”
Mary never saw her customers, only ever speaking with them on the telephone. On average she would take 80 calls a day, answering routine telephone enquiries and sometimes addressing problems that customers raised with her. What was impressive about Mary was that she loved going to work. She could not wait to pick up the first telephone call of the morning and throughout the day she looked for little things she could say or do to make her customers feel special. It might just have been a choice comment, or her warm friendly tone of voice, or grasping a particularly difficult problem and running with it to ensure a satisfactory solution.
Mary was world-class at her job. She recognized that if you do little things to make customers feel special they will return to you time and time again. Everyone likes to be made to feel important, while no one likes to be made to feel ordinary. We are all unique and therefore we all believe we deserve unique treatment from the people to whom we give our custom.
Unlike Mary, many of us drift into routine and then miss out on hundreds of opportunities to make customers feel special.
The following are some guidelines for making customers feel special:
Think special, feel special, and act special for all your customers.
Keep the word “special” in your mind at all times and every time you encounter a customer seek to apply this word to your behavior with that customer.
Try to identify the unique qualities in each customer and then do something unique to make them feel special.
Here are some further examples of little things you can do to make a customer feel special:
Make some special comment, such as “I love your name, Maria. It’s one of my favorites.”
Ask some special question, such as “I am intrigued by your accent. I hope you don’t mind if I ask where you are from?”
Do a special favor, such as “Just for you I am going to give you an upgrade on this occasion.”
Promise something special, such as “While our normal delivery time is seven days I promise I’m going do my best to get you the item delivered within the next 24 hours.”
Choose a special tone of voice that echoes an appropriate feeling, for example delight, or kindness, or excitement (depending on the situation and what the customer has to tell you).
By doing special things for customers’ day in and day out, you will become a very special person whom customers will seek out and bring their business to. This is the number one little thing you need to do en-route to becoming world-class.
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE PRACTICE
Hesitate for a brief moment every time you come into contact with a customer today, whether it be by face-to-face contact, telephone, email, or correspondence. During this moment think of a way you can make this particular customer feel special.
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE QUOTE:
Delivering world-class customer service is a specialism: making customers feel special.
