When you dine at a restaurant, you want the staff to look at you as more than just someone who’s just hungry. When you buy a car, you hope the salesperson understands that you really do care more than just getting from point-a to point-b. And when you plan a vacation, you care about more than just where you’re going to sleep at night.
Offering a personalized experience is one of the hallmarks of great customer service: it treats customers as individuals rather than lumping them all together with zero nuance. As you consider how to develop your business’s customer experience, it really helps to understand the different kinds of customers who consume your products and services so that you can make each person feel welcomed and appreciated.
Who Are Your Customers?
As Shep Hyken explains in his article, Don’t Just Personalize the Customer’s Experience – Individualize It, understanding personalization comes down to understanding your different client segments: “The simple way to explain it is that customers are segmented into several groups, known as personas, which could be defined by age, gender, interests, and more.” Hyken goes on to cite two Nike shoe customers, one of whom is interested in golfing and the other in running. If Nike’s gets its personalization right, the two customers will each get different promotional materials applicable to their interests. But it goes even beyond this generalization: “That means that even if two customers are interested in golf shoes, Nike might learn that one is a serious golfer, playing two or three times each week, and the other just plays for fun and golfs two or three times a year.” Understanding who you customers are is critical to personalizing their experience and making meaningful offers to them.
Obviously, most small businesses aren’t privy to a large amount of personal data about their individual customers, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an opportunity to achieve a similar effect.
Look Out for Your Customers
When your employees take the time to get to know your patrons, to understand their needs and offer solutions that make sense, then your customers end up feeling cared for and valued as more than just another sale. This means your employees must actively listen—that is, must hear what the customer is saying, think about it from his point-of-view, and then offer solutions that best fit those. Doing this requires empathy and thoughtfulness, which are trainable skills.
Communicating this way also requires openness and honesty. If your business is unable to meet a need exactly, your employees should acknowledge it. If a diner comes to your restaurant and says he can only eat gluten-free, then you shouldn’t pretend to be able to accommodate him just because you happen to carry gluten-free items. You can only really offer a gluten-free experience if you have an isolated prep and cook. (Or, you’re willing to scrub your kitchen down just to make his dish.) If you can’t do that, then be honest about it: tell him you carry the kinds of items he wants, but you can’t guarantee it’ll be 100% gluten free. And that might be good enough for most people! Either way, they’ll appreciate your candor.
Personalizing Communication
Learning your customers’ names, even if it’s on a per-transaction basis, is a big deal. Using a person’s name throughout a conversation really sets a specific tone, as it acknowledges that the customer is an individual person rather than just another receipt. Your employees should always been in the habit of introducing themselves and asking for the names of the people they’re helping.
Good record-keeping is also wise. In the example of a car dealership, salespeople should keep good notes about the people they speak with. Knowing that Mr. and Mrs. Smith want a truck with a lot of hauling power for their RV makes them a different case than Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, who want an SUV to fit their kids in with their soccer gear. When it comes time for your salesperson to follow up, remembering these details saves your customers the frustration of having to explain themselves again. It also shows that your business cares enough to put them in the right product.
Keeping notes applies to any business in which you are likely to see the same customers again and again. Even a restaurant would do well to keep information in their reservation system as they learn the appropriate details. If a server learns of a birthdate or anniversary, it’s a great idea to log it so that you can invite have them back the next time that date comes around the following year. That’s an effective use of your calendar!
Think about your own business. What are some ways you can personalize the experience for each of your customers, to see them as individual people rather than just order numbers? Consider the personal experiences you’ve had when you’ve dined out, shopped for a car, or booked a vacation. What did you enjoy? What could have been better?
Inspecting What You Expect
Need some help figuring out how to take your customer experience to the next level? Want to test how well your staff is keeping up with your sales initiatives? Interested in how your customers really feel about your brand?
The Brandt Group is here to help. We’ve been working with small businesses like yours for over 30 years, custom-tailoring our mystery shopping and leadership training services to each of the hundreds of clients we’ve been privileged enough to work with. That’s right: we wouldn’t suggest you should work on individualizing your customer experiences if we weren’t already practicing what we preach!
Want to learn more? Drop us a line here, and let’s start a conversation about how we can work together to set your business apart from the rest, so we can actualize its true potential and help it become one of the best.
