One of my mantras when speaking to banking groups about sales and service is, "Make a friend, make a customer."
I suggest that if teams dedicate themselves to making as many friends as possible in their markets, they will be doing most of what is necessary to build productive sales and service cultures.
One of my favorite slides in these presentations features a subject near and dear to my heart: my dog, Gumbo. As groups begin to chuckle, I ask them to stick with me because I have a (semi-) serious business point to make.
I then theorize about why dogs are man's best friends and cats are not.
Whenever we have owned cats in the past, I have been struck by the fact that most can take you or leave you. People who cohabitate with them apparently are being only begrudgingly tolerated.
Some days you come home to a cat that seems happy to see you. Just as often, however, the cat is pretty indifferent to you. Simply, the cat is about the cat; its level of interest in you depends entirely on how the cat feels.
I often ask participants to think of businesses that they have dealt with that fit that description. Sometimes you visit and are really impressed with the way you are treated. Other times you find yourself wondering if this could be the same place that impressed you before.
When we cannot trust a place's consistency, we tend to identify it with the lower level of service and attention we have experienced. It does not matter how great it might be now and then — we learn not to trust what the next experience will be like.
That is when I refer back to my dog. I like to point out that he is old and does not get around as well as he once did, so he would have valid excuses for giving me the cold shoulder. Yet when I get home from a trip, that dog will act like my walking through the back gate is the highlight of his day. If I go inside for a minute and return, it's again the apparent highlight of his day. If I drive down to the corner store and return 10 minutes later — you got it — it's the highlight of his day when he sees me again.
Dogs are man's best friend because they are consistent, and they are all about you.
When I joke about being "dogged" about customer service, I'm suggesting that the levels of interaction, service, and appreciation our customers receive each day should not be tied to how we happen to feel at that particular moment.
Customers really are the highlights of our days and the very reason we bother turning the lights on in the morning, right? Unfortunately, too often I have observed employees who apparently feel like customers stand between them and a really neat day.
A business owner is tickled when a customer is waiting at the door for the shop to open or makes the effort to get there just before closing time. But in far too many bank branches, those people are considered nuisances. How dare a customer expect the same level of engagement and enthusiasm from us five minutes before our posted closing time!
We all have days when we are not exactly in a jovial or upbeat mood, but the folks who are truly the best customer service providers seldom let a customer sense that.
Dee was one of my favorite employees when I managed a branch. She had the amazing ability to make each customer stepping up to her window feel like he or she was the reason she went to work that day.
There would be days when it was pretty obvious that she was not in a great mood. But the instant a customer approached, you would think that Dee was having a fantastic day, and that it had just gotten better because of whichever customer had just stepped up.
It was also no shock that as time went on, more and more customers insisted on waiting in her line.
I kidded her once about how customers always got to deal with "Happy Dee," and I got to deal with the other one. She laughed and said, "You get paid to deal with the other one. Customers pay the bills, so they get the 'Happy Dee.' "
To this day, I borrow Dee's logic when asking groups to remember that the most important people in their branches do not have bank titles and are not being paid to be there.
In an increasingly competitive and commoditized industry, being the one place where a customer can absolutely count on being made to feel important and appreciated may be the most powerful differentiator of all.
What are you and your teams doing to make sure your customers feel just that way today?
