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Grandma wants to buy from you! Imagine if you will the following situation: You’re busy at work and can hardly keep up with the pace. The phone rings and you answer it and discover it’s your grandma waiting to spend some of her hard-earned retirement money in your store. Of course, you take special care in helping her. You make sure she gets what she wants and you make sure it’s the right color, size, flavor, brand, shape… whatever, you get my drift. After all, it is your grandmother.
Now ask yourself this: How do I treat all of my customers? Would this be the exception, the rule or somewhere in between? Your grandmother will be back, but will they? How about your employees when you’re not around…do they treat the customer like gold or their grandma? Have you ever had someone phone or go into your place of business as a mystery shopper and report back to you? Does that sound scary because you are afraid of what you might hear?
As noted, author and speaker Jeffrey Gitomer writes, “The ‘Grandma’ [secret] self-test has the answer of truth. Here’s a sure-fire way to determine how ‘what you say’ will sound to the customer before you say it. A way to ‘test your talk’ so to speak.” Gitomer suggests that “every time you speak to a customer, you end it with ‘grandma.’” What he means is, if it sounds like something you would say to your grandmother, say it. If not, don’t. For example, how would this sound:
Now that you have an idea of how to treat customers, what about how you treat your own employees? This is where it all starts anyway. Your customers are only going to be as happy as the person serving them, so, much like you treat your spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend, if you want a pleasant relationship, you have to put some effort into it. I NEED HELP! Why is it so hard to find good help these days? Are the good workers taken? Do you lose staff faster then you can hire them? Are you hiring whoever comes through the door because you’re desperate? Maybe the workforce is not to blame… maybe it’s you. Why are you losing people? Do you treat your staff like gold? Or do you treat them like hired help? Maybe it’s time to start treating your staff like you would want to be treated if you were the employee. OUCH! That hurt didn’t it? I was recently chatting to a woman in the PMQ Chat Room and she said one of her stores was doing great, but the other was struggling. When questioned about this, she said it had to do with how the store is run. She ran one store and her husband ran the other. In her husband’s store, the staff were not being treated like she treated her staff and she felt that made all the difference. Your staff is the extension of you; if you are a jerk to your staff, they will probably be a jerk to your customers. Think about it, why would they care about taking care of your customer when you do not care about them? If you want to keep your staff start showing them you care. Here are a few suggestions to get you into “Happy Staff Land”
– PMQ – |