Masks, safety signs, and hand sanitizers won’t keep your customers

Face masks, door signs, floor decals, screens, and hand sanitizers will not keep your customers. Such security protocols in response to the pandemic are expected of your customers. While not implementing them will cost you customers, maintaining those standards will not guarantee that you will maintain them. Your competitors are doing the exact same thing, which means what you’re doing is average, high like everyone else, but still average. And…wait…nobody gets excited about average. Customers don’t rave about a business that simply meets their expectations. Nor are they loyally tied to them. With these safeguards, you have simply exchanged a negative experience for a neutral one. But what are you doing to make the experience go from neutral to memorably positive?

TAKE CARE of your Associates first. Hearing about hospitalizations, the struggling economy, and mass layoffs every day, his associates are still anxious and concerned about his jobs. Reassure them by your actions that your leadership team CARE. Communicate. Thank. Recognize. Authorize. To serve.

Serve your associates by asking at the end of each interaction, “What can I do for you?” And follow his suggestions to make your associates as happy working with you as you want your customers to be doing business with you.

Reorient your Associates toward delivering the customer experience in what is now the “not-so-new normal.” In the first weeks of the pandemic, he was focused on introducing all the new protocols. In recent months, his associates have consistently followed safety guidelines, from temporary check-ins to face masks. Take the time now to remind them of the principles of providing exceptional customer service. Emphasize that since your customers can’t see your smiles, they need to use body language other than handshakes and hugs, your words and tone of voice to convey a warm welcome. Remind them to practice active listening and respond with empathy. Remember the forbidden phrases that are distracting in customer conversations? Make sure they know the difference between caring for the customer, which is a transaction, and really caring for the customer, an interaction that builds a relationship.

Seek feedback and then act. You may learn 10-20% of your customer complaints through your customer surveys. Your customers know 100% what they dislike and so do your associates, as your customers tell them about it every day. So ask your team directly, “What are you listening to?” Then act on your feedback to remove those pain points. Be sure to involve your associates in defining solutions to eliminate these unsatisfactory ones. Without your participation, you won’t get your commitment to take care of your customers.

Become a storyteller. Three things can happen after customers do business with you. They can’t say anything because you didn’t give them anything to talk about. They may rant about you to others because they experienced such poor service that they want to make sure no one else makes the same mistake. Or they can speak wonders about you. And if you want your customers to tell stories about you, you have to give them a story to tell. Engage your associates to define key points in the customer experience where they are empowered to create memorable little “wows” so the story can end, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Remember that nobody cares how good you used to be before this pandemic. They only care about how good you are now. And now it changes every day. You need to do the same.