Be a better customer
When it comes to customer service, travelers and the companies that provide them with products and services agree: Great service can send a travel provider to the top of the heap as fast as crummy service can sink it. Sure — safety, security, cleanliness, convenience and the like all count, but when it comes to deciding who are the “best,” the awards almost always go to the companies that know how to treat their customers.
Accordingly, corporations spend a bundle on customer-service training programs. Employees learn how to greet their customers, how to respond to customer requests and how to handle customer complaints. But good intentions are one thing, success another. We often find ourselves in the hands of frontline employees of questionable training, uncertain authority and varying competence. Fortunately, you can increase your likelihood of getting the best service available by employing some of the same techniques that the companies use to train their employees — only in reverse.
All these techniques are based on the same principle: Make your business transaction more personal by changing your relationship with the employee. Specifically, you need to behave less like a customer and more like a friend.
How can you do this? To get some answers to this question, I called upon experts. Mary Blundell, Director of Service Excellence for Midwest Airlines, and Jim Coyle, whose New York firm provides quality- assurance consulting to the hospitality industry, helped me put together the following pointers.
Adjust your attitude. First impressions are real and influential. If you begin a relationship with a chip on your shoulder, your attitude will evoke a defensive posture from the person you are trying to get to help you. After an opening diatribe, it’s hard to step back and make nice. But a smile and calm voice can set the stage for a positive relationship, even if the relationship revolves around a complaint.
Use the employee’s name. There are few things more personal than a person’s name, and the best way to personalize a relationship is to use it. Addressing a person by name, particularly by his first name, has the immediate effect of lowering some of the defenses that all people have in the presence of strangers. Using an employee’s name also introduces an element of personal accountability for that employee, who then becomes more invested in the success of the transaction.
Ask for a supervisor? This is a tricky one, as the usual advice to ask for a supervisor, who may have more authority to help you, can easily backfire. It depends on your reason for asking. If you speak to a supervisor to praise the job that an employee is doing for you, you can expect good treatment. But if you want a supervisor to overturn an employee’s decision or action, you may be in for a surprise. More often than not, the supervisor will support her employee. After all, she and the employee must work together long after you’ve disappeared from the scene.
Slip ’em a tip. For the most part, nominal tips are expected and appreciated by people in the service industry, and they can help keep you in good favor with them. But tipping is a delicate matter, and overtipping can actually work against you. For one thing, an extravagant tip can cause resentment among the recipient’s coworkers, making his job more difficult. More importantly, heavy tipping reintroduces business into the personal relationship you are trying to foster. What’s worse, your generosity may be interpreted as condescension. So be careful.
Short answer? Be nice. If you simply allow yourself to be friendly and congenial, a relationship will develop on its own that will better serve both you and the employees whose job it is to provide service.