In the 1997 Movie “As Good As It Gets” Academy Award Winner Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt that being around her changes his persona.
“You make me want to be a better man”
And it’s true.
Hanging around with nice people makes us be nicer people ourselves.
Now we can easily apply and use this principle in our day-to-day dealings with everybody we come in contact with when we’re out and about.
You see, one of the best ways of giving great customer service is to practice being a great customer yourself when you are out and about doing your day-to-day businesses.
By consciously *being* the customer, or the “ideal” customer, and having that ideal customer mindset at front of mind gives you the opportunity to learn how to encourage and entice the great customer behaviour we would like to see in our very own customers, clients and patients that we are dealing with at our dental office on a day to day basis.
However, getting the *nice* out, and keeping it out at all times, can be a difficult task as a consumer.
You know what it’s like. You have things on your mind. Other things.
You’re mind is worried about those other things. And you’re distracted by those other things from giving your full attention to the task at hand, which is really just another person doing their own day to day routine and procedures.
Sometimes it’s true distraction, but sometimes it’s just plain old inattention. Sometimes we just haven’t thought about the words we use as a customer, and whether those words we use could be improved upon to really, and I mean *really*, make the day of the person who is serving us.
And it’s not that we’re rude people….. sometimes we’re just too busy to stop and think ourselves as to whether there IS a better way that we could say things to make this person feel more important?
Is there a better way I could have asked for something that would allow me to appear to be more endearing to the person serving me?
Now sometimes, it doesn’t matter whether our words as a customer are dripping with butter and sugar and honey.
They fall on deaf ears, or the person we are being served by does not have customer service radars….
Or we just think they don’t?
But what if today is the day?
What if you, as a customer, are *THE* customer for that person that changes their whole way of seeing things? That changes their whole perception of the world?
What if you are *THE* Customer for that person who magically switches the light on for them?
How would you feel; how would it make you feel, if the roles were reversed?
Wouldn’t you just love to feel special, or to be made to feel special?
Here are a couple of examples of how I’m thinking…. now maybe you might think that I’m just over the top here, but ask yourself this… If you were the person doing the serving, would you notice the difference?
For example, next time you’re out with a group at a restaurant, watch out for, or listen to, the language or words that your friends and dining companions use when ordering from the waitperson.
What you’ll find is that most of them will order like this:
“I’ll have the lamb for a starter and I’ll have the beef for my main…”
Now just for a minute think if that order could have been put more pleasantly…
“For my starter could I *Please Have* the lamb and for my main I’d like to have the beef…”
Or at the delicatessen: You’re placing an order for some smallgoods…
“Give me a half a pound of king prawns and six pieces of bacon”….
Replace that with “Could I please have a half a pound of….”
Now doesn’t that sound so much more pleasant?
And it’s that simple…if we start looking out for ways to improve our own message as a customer, then we start to look out for ways to improve and perfect our own messages that we send out to our very own customers as well.
And by doing that, by crafting our words, we certainly do lift our game. We lift it up notches! Not just one notch, we lift it up several.
And by lifting our game, we become more pleasant to do business with. And by becoming more pleasant to do business with, guess what?
Word spreads…word gets out…AND it will!
Wouldn’t you rather your customers be talking about how nice you are?
Rather than how un-nice you are?
We’ve all heard our friends discussing how rude someone was who served them…and yet I’m sure nobody, not even the Soup Nazi, sets out to be rude on purpose…
So try it. Go out there and consciously lift your vocabulary.
And you’ll find two things happen.
You’ll find that you start to lift your game. And repeatedly, you lift it more often and you lift it further.
And you’ll find that what you give out will come back at you.
And come back at you in some of the strangest places…
And who knows? Your better words, your new outlook, might just be the one thing that changes somebody else’s day…or their whole life…
Learning how to be Customer Service focused is easy when you consider it’s just one of the many simple to implement modules that comprise The Ultimate Patient Experience, a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Email me at david@theupe.com
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