The Trouble Is…

13. March 2009 by The Original Bulldog - Bob Griffin.

I came in late one night last week. It was bedtime for my son and I went to his room to say “goodnight”. I tucked him in and told him I was also going to bed. He said, “Ooooh, Dad did you get in trouble?!” I hurt myself laughing that night.  I also had a great night’s sleep.

Perception is everything in this world and to my son going to bed early meant something bad.  To me it meant recovering from a long day. I would have thought the same thing when I was seven years old. Funny how things change.

The disconnect we have with people sometimes can very well be the same thing I had with my son. Hopefully it makes you smile like he made me, but more often it is the reason we lose customers. Simply put, we forget to see things through the customer’s eyes.

I was assisting an owner of a restaurant on his operations when I overheard a customer ask a waiter if they could have more napkins. The waiter asked if there was a spill. The customer asked for napkins once again and once again the waiter asked where the problem was. After this impasse occurred, the customer flung cash on the table and left. Standing by the door I could see the customer leaving and could tell there was no saving the situation. I also noticed a splatter of tomato sauce on the front of his trousers from his lunch.

It is tough to fault the waiter since he was taught to be helpful and find out exactly what the customers want. You can’t blame a customer for wanting to clean up a mess he made quietly. So what would have made this better? Looking through the customer’s eyes and seeing that he didn’t want to tell the waiter he was clumsy would have helped better and made the customer more comfortable. As it is, the customer did not come back again.

How many times have you thought you were being helpful and really just making a mess of things? I bet there are examples every day where we think about things through our own perspective and do not see things as another person intended them. Reading people is an art form that every person in the service industry needs to work on daily.

Since over 80% of communication is non-verbal, your assignment is to go someplace where you can watch people (not stalk or stare at them) and see what they are “saying” through their body language. After a while you will notice trends such as smiling, touching, moving fast or slow, and where people look tell you what the person has on their mind. The next step is to figure out what you would do if that person was in your store.

A smiling person is the best. They are happy to be there and can be a good customer. Someone who is holding there arms across their chest tightly is not ready to buy, but may be willing to listen to you explain you products. Someone looking closely at an item is interested and may need a small push to buy. Read them and act reasonably to get the best results.

How things are perceived is the key to having a successful business. The trick is to learn the perception your customer has for your business and change what you do to meet their needs.

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