If anyone’s job involves customer interaction, what should he know?

It’s not about you. If I had to pick just one thing, it’d be that. And it’s not even just relevant to customer and client interaction. It’s for all consistent social challenges. It’s not about you. Meaning, always approach the interaction from a place of caring about and being interested in them.Throughout my professional journey, I have seen multiple phases of interactions starting as a salesperson with cold calling, door to door sales, and up to a project head involving business clients for B2B. I would be pleased to help you.

Here are the four practices for interaction with customers/clients:

#1 Give respect, get respect: That’s simple to understand. Show empathy and gratitude towards them for giving you their time.

#2 Don’t make them wait:  For that, I could have said punctuality also. If it’s an in-person interaction, be punctual. No one likes to wait. Be very careful and confident with your scheduling, so that you don’t ever have to call back and reschedule with a person. If you ever do, which you probably will someday, because it happens, apologize and make sure you are extra accommodating.

#3 Be accurate while giving information: Before the interaction, do sufficient groundwork, and take care of the accuracy of the information and the facts you give them. There’s also what I call negative accuracy. This means not trying to be accurate about things you wouldn’t truly know. Basically not assuming things. Nothing irritates a customer like when a salesperson assumes things about them that they never said.

#4 Leverage content and other team members: Sometimes it’s easier to have a customer look up something to learn it on their own time, rather than try to understand it as you explain it for them. Know when to refer the customer to website content or guides, or even other people in the business, so you can move on in the conversation. It’s better than talking too long or talking without complete assurance that what you’re saying is correct.

Well, I feel like giving more of the tips running through my head, but I want to be sure they’re relevant to you.

In addition to the above points, if your job involves making sales after interacting with customers/clients, then I have something very useful to suggest.

With my experience in that, as well as from the suggestions of experts who have frequent interactions with customers, I have found that there are five universal objections that a customer can have when you approach them. As a ripple effect of those objections being unsolved, sales might drop. I have discussed all those objections as well as their solutions in my post: 5 Deep-Seated Customer Doubts That Kill Your Sales (And How to Erase Them). That post could be of great help to anyone whose job involves frequent customer interaction.

In conclusion, I would like to share a quote that fits in for the context of your question: “To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.“

Don’t forget to leave me feedback once you read that post. Please feel free to reply to me in case you need more information on any of the points discussed above.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo