Tag Archive for: customer service

5 Customer Types every Business should Understand

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Customers are the lifeblood of every business. Businesses exist purely based on the sales and services they provide their customers. Understanding customers,  why they do what they do – and buy what they buy! – starts with understanding a few basic customer types. While putting people into strict categories is difficult, and often inadvisable, getting to know a couple of stereotypes will help establish strategies to deal with them as well.

5 General Customer Types:

The Regular

Every store has at least one regular – whether it’s a cafe, supermarket, or retail shop. Regular customers are the ones who return to the store on a consistent basis. In the hospitality industry – cafes, restaurants, etc. – these customers tend to have a standard order, a favourite place to sit, and make it a habit to swing by at the same time each week. They’re predictable, and value predictability – they’re also a business’ bread and butter clientele. They’re most likely to recommend your business to others, and bring their friends and acquaintances to your establishment.

The Hands-off Customer

These customer types are often considered the easiest to service. They come to a store because they’re looking for something specific; they know what they want, what it should cost, and have come to a particular place looking for it. In sales speak, these customers are 90% through the buyer’s journey and don’t necessarily require any hands-on customer service. Asking if they require any assistance or if they’re interested in specials is usually met with a polite “No, thank you.”

The Unpleasable Customer

Everyone who has worked in any customer-facing position knows these customers. These are the eternal complainers, the ones who are simply impossible to please. Even if your business has exactly what they want they will find something that does not meet their standards or expectations. They require extra – often exclusive – attention, and often ask for the supervisor or manager. Truth be told, the only way to manage these customers is to do the best you can, and be forever courteous. Careful handling of this type of customer may not lead to sterling recommendations or any customer advocacy, but it can stop them from complaining to their friends and family – one wrong step with this stereotype and your business could suffer a negative hit of publicity!

The Window Shopper

“Were you after anything particular today?”
“No, thank you. I’m just browsing.”

This little conversation is a common occurrence in most retail outlets, and even in the occasional cafe or restaurant. The Window Shopper comes in two general categories:

    • The Researcher: looking for something but isn’t entirely sure what it is yet – or if your business is the right place to get it.
    • The Browser: literally just looking without any intention to buy anything.

Neither type is a waste of time in any regard and should be considered as a potential customer – maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.

The Unicorn

The unicorn of all customers: the one who comes in regularly, gushes positivity about your establishment, and just won’t shut up about how amazing your business is when they’re talking with their friends. This perfect, ideal customer fits your dream client exactly; they’re the sort of person you hope will walk in through the door, they’re the one you strive to reach. For example, if you sell minivans, your unicorn might be a soccer mom with a big budget and six kids – oh, and the reason why she’s buying a van is because she’s carpooling with the other mothers at school, to whom she will avidly recommend your van. In marketing terms, she is the ideal customer persona. Unicorns are mythical – they don’t really exist; no matter what industry you are in – but it’s important to understand that they are a dream, a target, however impossible to strive for. The purpose of knowing what your unicorn looks like is to strive to turn every single one of your customers into your ideal customer through great customer service.

By understanding customers, businesses can learn to grow in the right direction to meet their customer expectations, train their customer service representatives, and develop better communication tactics to deal with particular elements of their customer base. While this list generalizes customer types, it’s important to realize that there are certain elements of each stereotype at play in each individual customer.

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Human Decency and the Customer Experience

This morning on the way into work, I was confronted with human decency.

After a rough start to the day – starting with my oversleeping – all I wanted was to buy my morning caffeine hit from the little coffee place where I get my wake-up call every morning.

I auto-piloted off the train and out of the station and headed towards caffeine. As I waited in line, coffee in hand, the gentleman in front of me glanced back and then told the cashier that he’d get my drink as well. I didn’t think I looked that tired, but maybe I did; it was one of those days.

Now. As a female, alone, and in public, there are several things that go through my head when something like this happens. My brain processes go roughly like this:

Brain: Wait what?
Voice: You don’t have to!…Are you sure?
Brain: What’s the catch?/I’m not going out with you./There has to be a catch, no one does stuff like this./Do I really look that tired?/Do I come across as being unable to afford my own coffee?/I’m offended/I’m flattered/I’m late! I don’t have time to be nicer!
Voice: Thank you!
Brain: Darn, I hope I expressed my thanks properly./Oh, he’s gone with no further queries or conversation./Now I feel guilty for doubting his motives, I hope he understands that I’m grateful./Faith in humanity restored.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, or possibly of my inner cynic revealing herself because it’s too early in the morning and my collective consciousness has had a rough start. Truth is, I am grateful. Not just for the coffee, but for the fact that there are still people out there who believe in doing right.

Part of the problem with the world is that we’ve lost sight of each other as individual people. We’re all so caught up in our personal issues that we forget that we’re all part of the same world and we could all use a bit of human decency.

“Pay it forward,” the gentleman from this morning said to me. And I will.

Something else this experience highlighted was that one of the best customer service pointers you can have in your toolbox is simple human decency.

Empathy is one of those things we talk about a lot, but rarely practice. How much do we actually care that the customer who just came in had trouble parking? Or ran into an old friend just down the street? Be honest: we don’t actually care at all – we may listen, and nod and smile, but as soon as the customer’s out the door we’ll forget about their little experience. That’s just how humanity works.

I’m not suggesting that we take everyone’s stories home with us – that’s not healthy, but really listening to someone’s story gives you a deeper connection with that customer, and customer service is all about connections. Human decency is about how well we develop those connections and under what motives we form them.

The gentleman from this morning had nothing material to gain from buying my coffee for me – he wasn’t even the one doing the selling – but what he did prove was that a simple gesture of human decency completely changed my day. Apply that to customer service and you get a winning recipe. Showing people a personal touch, paying a little more attention to their needs, can make all the difference.

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[Intern Insight] Imagining the Future: The Limits of Customer Service Psychology

Customer Service Psychology: Splitting Hairs

Customer service psychology is an ongoing debate amongst the experts and amateurs of every industry. It is all about how you greet, speak and act with the customer. In order to better measure it you have tools such as ‘Customer Journey Mapping’, ‘Customer Emotional Behaviour Mapping’, ‘Customer – Employee Touch points Chart’ and so on. However, in our pursuit of a psychological understanding of our customers we’ve lost track of what they’re actually doing. The thought processes behind every decision a customer makes are all well and good, but once we over-analyse these decisions we forget that behind those choices there are some very basic business consequences.
In the course of designing my current project, a training application for the retail industry, I started by establishing the basic customer journey and the key moments that impact the experience. I definitely agree that this is the best way to initiate a thorough customer experience analysis. Mapping the customer journey is a powerful tool to provide accurate data. That said, I reached an impasse when trying to analyze each moment from a psychological point of view.

Moment Number 1

Let’s start at the beginning!

The customer must be greeted. This is the standard procedure. But how do you greet the customer? Should it be verbal or non-verbal or a combination of both? Are we actually aware when doing it or is it just a reflex? Are we on customer service auto-pilot? Do we take into account the cultural differences or the emotional impact? Are we subconsciously mirroring the behavior of the customer? Does that work in our favor or against us?

Moment Number 27

Somewhere along the way, we get to the moment where the customer decides to purchase. In this step, we are advised to escort him, talk with him, personalize the experience, and make sure he doesn’t change his mind. That’s the best practice – that’s ‘by the book’ in customer service psychology. However, does he even want to be escorted? How does the customer feel being constantly accompanied?

And about all that personalisation…? How personal is sufficiently personal without getting too personal?

The point is that we have these ideas of what the customer should experience in terms of ‘good service’, from the moment they enter the store to their point of purchase. At the same time, we want to measure and quantify it so we can keep track of what we’re doing wrong or right.

If we want to trigger certain behavior, the science of customer service psychology tells us we have to adopt certain attitudes. If we want to create a specific ambambiancee can use certain colors. Need something to look better value for less money? Just put 99 cents at the end of the price. And although we have so many theories and articles that discuss this subject, we still don’t have an accurate grasp on true customer service psychology.

Why is that?

Believe it or not, it’s not so easy to influence the human mind.
It’s not the new trend or the new sales technique that is so effective. The power lies in mapping the customer’s decision-making process. There’s a pattern that repeats itself. Do you buy the latest IPhone because you need it or because it’s new? The pattern of wanting the newest product as soon as it is available is one of the driving successes behind brands like Apple’s IPhone. The psychology behind it, however, can differ from person to person. The idea is that we are trapped in the inertia of our own decision process without even being aware.

There are so many reasons why customers decide to do what they do. In the ocean of all these ‘whys’, should we bother with customer service psychology when, as businesses, we could be focussing on the fact that they just do?

Food for thought.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure. 

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[Intern Insight] Imagining the Future: How Workplace Fun Transforms Companies.

People love duality. You have ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘love’ and ‘hate’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘ying’ and ‘yang’. It makes things easier if you only have to pick from two sides. And naturally, duality must apply for all aspects of our lives. Nowadays, we speak in terms of ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ life; workplace fun seems oxymoronic. They are separate entities, locked in eternal combat, two sides of the same coin…all the romantic terms you can think of. The point is, they are extreme opposites and never mix. Or do they?

How workplace fun has evolved?

It has come to my attention that somehow, somewhere, a curious aspect – definitely shelved in our personal life – has crept into our professional life, and it’s called ‘fun’.

The concept of ‘fun’ is starting to change how we perceive our working space, how fast we learn new skills, how engaged we become in our jobs and how long we remain in our current position.

Fun is shaped by the change in attitude towards gamification. If we make it a game and it is fun, then the learning process is simplified and sustainable over a longer period of time. Even more so if this is incorporated into a digital mobile platform.

And how do retail companies respond to that?

Again, we have two opposite sides.

The general fear is if employees spend time playing on their phones, then they do not dedicate enough time to the customer. While correct, we have to think outside of the box. Shouldn’t we be tapping into this ‘mobile playing’ obsession by adding game elements to learning materials to improve employee engagement? Is the time spent with the customer well used? Just adding the right elements in the right order does not necessarily mean it would work.

How would a mobile application change that?

First of all, more than 74% of companies currently use learning management systems (LMS) and virtual classroom/webcasting/video. From the other perspective, 77% of internet users network via mobile phones daily. It can’t be helped, it’s like a drug! 966 million — or 78% of all 1.2billion gamers worldwide — admit to playing games daily. It’s like a match made in heaven!

 How exactly would a gamified mobile app help?

It would reduce employee turnover and increase employee performance. It’s like a game of dominos, really! Everything is connected! It will also affect customer satisfaction, loyalty, and general sales.

Is it future-oriented or just a passing fad?

As proven by Kurzweils’ Acceleration Law, technological advancement intensifies faster with each year. Therefore, an app that keeps up with all the demand changes, offers personalized training, and makes it so much fun that you would be playing it in your spare time, is definitely a thing of the future! It will still be ‘a la mode’ 100 years from now when employees sell oxygen masks on Mars!

 

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure. As a result, she knows a lot about the subject being discussed in this guest post: Workplace Fun.

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Improving Global Customer Service: The Long-term Mission

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At AQ, we’re all about improving global customer service. Our mission statement says it all: “To let people experience great service.” But what do we mean when we say that? Today, I want to break the ice, crack the fourth wall, and tell you a little about that.

When AQ was founded in 2001 by Jan-Willem Smulders and Thomas Kascha, the theme was simple: advance quality service. The goal was to help businesses improve their customers’ experiences by improving the level of service they were experiencing. Over time, AQ focused on mystery shopping. Why? Improving global customer service requires both qualitative and quantitative data. More importantly, however, is that to truly understand what goes on in a business, the human element has to be measured. That’s not something that’s done with other market research tools like surveys or external focus groups for example. By specializing in mystery shopping AQ can pinpoint the cause of a drop in sales with quality accuracy.

Taking this specialization, we partner with our clients to help them develop a better understanding of their own employees and their own systems. Sometimes all it takes to boost sales and engagement is a little bit of insight from a reliable source. AQ strives to be that reliable source. We put an emphasis on quality assurance precisely for that purpose, insights are all well and good but if the foundational data isn’t of the highest quality no one benefits.

Ultimately, our quest is to make sure that every industry around the world has the highest level of customer service possible. The trouble is, of course, that customer expectations keep evolving. Our work will never be done, but it is our hope to keep adapting to these changing concepts and demands and guide our clients along the way. We believe in continuous improvement, doing the right thing by everyone, and, above all, that everyone deserves to experience great service.

 

 

 

 

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