The Customer Focus Series – Part 3

Say ‘Hello.’ Repeat.

Are you kidding me? We’re taking the entire blog post for this?! Yep. Believe me, this is not common knowledge.

You and I hire people from all sorts of backgrounds, with varying cultures and customs. The point is, you have to train folks to the specific vision you have for your company. I want Nolan Painting employees to follow the Five Rules of Friendliness. We’ll start with two of them today.

The Five Rules of Friendliness, #1 & #2:

1. First, I want them to look the customer in the eye and use their name in a sentence, introducing themselves.

“Hello, my name is Chris. I’ll be in charge of the project that we, Nolan Painting, will be doing on your property today.”

1. Okay, and then the follow-up is to do the same thing on day two, including reintroducing their own name as the Nolan Painting employee. People forget your name when they first hear it. And then, when they are reminded on day two, they’re grateful to you 100% of the time. You gave them that lifeline, and they’ll try not to forget it the second time.

“Hello, good morning. I’m Chris with Nolan Painting; we met yesterday. We’ll be finishing up your painting project today.”

I know this works so well because of our report cards. Our report cards are far more numerous than our Google reviews; we’re getting over  2,000 a year, and they all have the names of our people in them:

“Mike was fantastic. He was great with my dog.”

and

“You know, Joe and Aaron were terrific with my kids. They easily dealt with the chaos in our house.”

You know, customers never call us and say,“Joe was sloppy.” If they have a problem, they simply talk to Joe about it. Anyway, we get a lot of great comments with names. Dale Carnegie said,  “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” So, I recommend you use their name, and they need to know your name, too.

Let’s get this first-name-basis thing going.

Next, we’ll move on to The Five Rules of Friendliness #3.

See you next week. Build muscle.