Three ways to build better rapport with customers

You've seen the half-hearted attempts at rapport.

Employees say "welcome" with the enthusiasm of gray paint. They use your name like they're working through a checklist. (They are.)

It feels so transactional.

Rapport is essential to customer service. But here's the kicker—it has to be authentic. Asking a customer, "How's your day going so far?" with the sincerity of a robot can hurt the rapport you're trying to build.

So what makes it real?

I posed this question on LinkedIn, and it was a stumper. Most gave answers like, "You know it when you see it."

That's not much to go on. Try training an employee by telling them, “I can’t tell you exactly how to do it, but you’ll know it if you’re doing it right.”

You need to get much more specific if you want your employees to build authentic rapport. This guide can help.

What is customer rapport?

Let's start with a definition of rapport so we're all on the same page. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines rapport this way:

1. a friendly, harmonious relationship

2. especially: a relationship characterized by agreement, mutual understanding, or empathy that makes communication possible or easy

Harmony is the foundation of customer service. You want customers to like you. And, you'd much prefer to like them back.

Rapport, by definition, makes communication easy. You can better understand their needs and customers are more accepting of your ideas.

It's also tied to better service outcomes. In one study of fast food chains, friendly employees helped compensate for long wait times and poor order accuracy.

What makes rapport genuine?

Authentic rapport goes beyond just acting out a corporate-mandated service script. It is an earnest attempt to create a friendly, harmonious connection with someone else.

Three things in particular help you establish real rapport.

Step 1: Smile with your eyes

There's a world of difference between a fake, forced smile and a real one. The fake smile communicates, "I have to be nice to you," while the real smile shares, "I'm genuinely happy to see you."

The eyes are a marker of a genuine smile.

The 19th-century scientist, Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne discovered that facial muscles are connected to authentic smiles. Particularly, those around the eyes.

Today, genuine smiles are called "Duchenne smiles" after Duchenne's pioneering work.

Later, psychologist Paul Ekman mapped these facial movements and identified the specific markers of genuine and fake smiles:

• the cheeks are pulled up and the skin below the eye may bag or bulge

• the lower eyelid moves up and crows feet wrinkles may appear

• the skin above the eye is pulled slightly down and inwards

On the other hand, a fake smile might look identical at the mouth, but doesn't feature the same muscle movement around the eyes.

Do you think you can spot a fake smile from a real one? Test your skills here.

Authentic smiles carry tremendous power. They can be contagious, and positively affect the moods of others. You've probably experienced this when a stranger smiled at you and you reflexively smiled back.

Step 2: Use consistent body language

The same words, said differently, can communicate very different messages.

Saying, "Hello" in a robotic monotone while frowning communicates unfriendliness or disinterest, even though the word itself is a common greeting.

On the other hand, a "Hello" delivered with a genuine smile, a warm tone of voice, and a wave instantly communicates friendliness and welcoming.

This makes it essential for our tone and body language to send the same friendly signals that we're trying to communicate with our words.

A psychologist named Albert Mehrabian conducted a series of experiments to show the impact of our words, tone, and body language on communicating emotions.

Published in his book, Silent Messages, Mehrabian's research revealed that body language carries the most weight when our words, tone, and body language send conflicting messages.

He estimated how much each contributed to likability when the words, tone, and body language didn’t match:

• 55% body language

• 38% tone of voice

• 7% words

These percentages have since been mischaracterized as holding true for all forms of communication, but that myth is a different story.

Mehrabian’s research explains why scripted rapport often falls flat. The employee might say the right words, but the customer won't believe them if those words are delivered with absolutely no feeling or intent.

If you want to make a customer feel welcome, you have to go beyond the words you use:

1. Start with a smile. That influences your tone.

2. Use open, friendly body language, such as a wave.

3. Increase the pitch and dynamics in your voice to convey warmth.

Step 3: Demonstrate interest

Rapport, by definition, is a relationship characterized by "agreement, mutual understanding, or empathy." In other words, you actually have to care about what the other person is thinking and feeling.

The best way to demonstrate true caring is to take an interest in your customer.

I learned this lesson the hard way when I was a teenager working in a clothing store. "How are you today?" quickly became my go-to customer greeting until a customer went off script with her reply.

"I'm terrible."

It was unexpected. I must have looked stunned, because the customer followed up with, "Well, you asked!"

Indeed, I did. From that day forward, I resolved to care about the questions I asked, even if it was something as innocuous as "How are you today?"

Of course, you can ask your customers better questions than that. Use the Five Question Technique to come up with a list of question that will capture your customer's attention, break the ice, and help you discover more about them.

Conclusion

The ultimate measure of rapport is your customer's reaction.

• Do they return your smile or become stone-faced?

• Does their body language relax or become tense?

• Do their words and tone indicate enjoyment or are they guarded?

The goal is a smiling, relaxed customer who is enjoying themselves. That's the person who will be more open to your ideas and feel better about their experience.

You're tempted to think this is obvious. But the simple fact is employees at many companies aren't attempting to build genuine rapport.

Like any customer service skill, you have to put in the work to get better.

Friendliness is more important than speed for fast food chains

Imagine you had to improve customer satisfaction. You are given limited time and a small budget. (Okay, you probably don't have to imagine those limitations.)

What would you focus on to get the best results?

1. Increasing service speed

2. Reducing service errors

3. Improving employee friendliness

According to data from Intouch Insight, the answer is number three, friendliness.

A nationwide study of fast food restaurants showed that employee friendliness was most tightly correlated with customer satisfaction. Friendly employees can even help offset the impact of slower service or a higher error rate.

Let's look at the data.

How friendliness connects to customer satisfaction

The Intouch Insight study used mystery shoppers to evaluate the drive-thru experience at ten fast food brands.

More than 1,500 visits were completed. The visits were spread out over different times of day and evaluated multiple factors including wait time, order accuracy, and friendliness.

That factor most closely correlated with overall satisfaction was friendliness:

Chick-fil-A was first in overall satisfaction (tied with Carl's Jr.) at 95 percent. It was also first in friendliness, with 88 percent of shoppers rating employees as friendly. Carl's Jr. was second in friendliness, at 83 percent.

Wendy's came in last, with just 82 percent of shoppers satisfied with their experience. It also had the worst friendliness rating at just 58 percent.

It probably isn't a big surprise that friendliness is connected to satisfaction.

The more surprising results come from looking at other factors such as accuracy, speed, or even perceived food quality.

Accuracy and speed are less important to customers

One of the factors rated by mystery shoppers was whether they received the correct order. There were two big surprises here.

First, none of the fast food chains in the study were accurate more that 89 percent of the time. That means one in ten orders were wrong.

Not good.

The second surprise was the relatively poor connection between order accuracy and overall satisfaction.

McDonald's tied for Arby's for best accuracy, at 89 percent, yet it was ninth in overall satisfaction. Chick-fil-A, the friendliness leader, had pretty terrible accuracy at 83 percent.

Okay, so what about speed?

This seems like it should be very important. It's called fast food after all, and the whole point of a drive-thru is to maximize speed and convenience.

Once again, speed didn't correlate with overall satisfaction.

The drive-thru was the slowest at satisfaction leader, Chick-fil-A. KFC had the fastest average time at 5:03, but ranked eighth in overall satisfaction.

One reason it takes longer to go through the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A is because there tends to be more cars in line than at other chains. Chick-fil-A is much faster when you factor in the other cars in line.

Yet, there's still no correlation. McDonald's had the second-best speed per car, yet it ranked next-to-last in overall satisfaction.

These results back up another study that suggests customers' perception of wait time is influenced by more than just how long they had to wait.

What about food quality?

Intouch did its study in partnership with QSR, so I pulled data from a separate QSR study for this one. It analyzed online reviews and scored several dimensions, including food quality, based on what customers mentioned in the review comments.

Chick-fil-A had the highest food quality rating of the ten chains, but the real surprise was food quality didn't correlate tightly with overall satisfaction.

The line in the chart shows the food quality ratings. The number scale represents the ratio of positive to negative comments about the food.

Chick-fil-A had a score of 5.65, which means it gets 5.65 positive mentions about the food in online reviews for every negative comment. Yet co-satisfaction leader, Carl’s Jr., had a relatively poor food quality score of 2.29.

McDonald’s was last, with a score of 1.27. Burger King, which was mid-pack in customer satisfaction, had the second-worst food quality score of 1.43.

When it comes to quality, there's Chick-fil-A and then there's everyone else.

How can companies be more friendly?

Asking employee to be more friendly is easier said than done. Otherwise, friendliness would be the norm.

It helps to look at reasons why employees aren't friendly. Fast food employees tend to face a variety of challenges, including uncertain schedules, low pay, and demanding bosses. Even naturally friendly employees can find themselves struggling to smile in these environments.

Poor products and services also lead to mutually assured dissatisfaction. Customers get more angry, which makes employees’ jobs more miserable. Eventually, nobody’s happy.

For example, a McDonald’s cashier once looked me straight in the eye and said, “I hate people like you,” because I didn’t have exact change when paying for my meal. (This was a long time ago when paying with cash was the norm.)

It took my a long time to figure out why the employee was so rude.

You can read that story in the first chapter of my book, Getting Service Right. Download the first chapter for free right here.

Conclusion

This data reveals two important points.

First, Chick-fil-A has a well-earned reputation for great food and service but it doesn't pay a penalty for long wait times and poor order accuracy.

Second, friendliness isn't as obvious as it might seem. Otherwise, more fast food chains would put it on the menu.

How to Learn and Remember Customer Names

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. 

Dale Carnegie wrote that in his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was originally published in 1936, and calling someone by name is still a powerful way to build rapport. 

It's a core concept in many customer service training programs. Calling customers by name is written into service standards and welcoming procedures. It's a tip I share in my Customer Service Tip of the Week emails.

Sometimes, learning a customer's name is easy. They offer it freely, it's displayed in your computer system, or learning their name is a necessary part of the interaction.

At other times, learning someone's name can be a bit more tricky. I decided to ask some of my colleagues for their suggestions on learning and using customer names. 

Here are some tips that can help you overcome those challenging situations.

Tip #1: Listen with Intention

How many times have you heard someone's name and then instantly forgotten it? Jeremy, a customer experience director, suggests being more intentional. "My biggest thing with names is that I have to actually listen to their name when I ask for it."

Tip #2: Repeat It

Immediately repeating a customer's name can help commit it to memory. Nicolas, an editor, shared this tip. "I immediately try repeating their name right after they introduce themselves ('Nice to meet you, ____!') and when I end the first conversation ('Thanks for connecting with me ____, have a great day!')."

Tip #3: Ask How to Pronounce It

Some names are tricky. Jessica, a customer experience team lead, shared a tip to handle this situation. "I will ask them to pronounce it for me if I’m not entirely sure how to correctly pronounce it, that is if I can see what their name is before speaking with them. I find most people appreciate the effort taken to learn the correct pronunciation."

Tip #4: Ask How to Spell It

I've been doing a lot of book signings lately to promote my latest book Getting Service Right. I've learned the hard way that some names can be spelled many different ways. Take Kari for example. Which may also be spelled as Karie, Carrie, Kerry, Kerri, Karri, or Keri. So I always ask people how to spell their name before I write it in a book, even if the person's name is Joe. (Which might also be Jo, Jho, or some other spelling I haven't seen yet.)

Tip #5: Write it Down

Another way to ensure you retain someone's name is to write it down. Drew, a customer service vice president, shared this tip. "Our business is mainly done over the phone or online and in many cases the customer doesn't introduce their name to start. So, we start by listening about why they're calling and as soon as they're done, we ask their name before we continue on with the conversation and write it down in notepad on the computer."

Tip #6: Get Their Name from Their ID or Credit Card

If you serve customers face-to-face, you might easily get their name from the customer's identification, credit card, or something else. Ruairi, a library assistant, uses this tip. "When they register for a library card, they hand me their ID. I might say 'okay Sarah, what color library card would you like?'"

Tip #7: Spot Their Name on Luggage Tags

This one works well for hotel and airline employees. You can get a customer’s name from their luggage tag. And if you work at a convention facility, you’ll often spot guests wearing name tags from the various trade shows they're attending.

Tip #8: Create an Association

Some people find it helpful to associate a name with a characteristic that describes the person. Andras, a customer service manager, shared this tip. "I associate the first letter of their name with an apparent personality or physical trait. For example, John with 'jovial' or Oliver with 'observant' etc."

Tip #9: Create a Memory

Similar to creating an association, you can mentally repeat someone's name while thinking of how you've met them. Tom, an IT manager, shared this tip with me. "I try to memorize their face and associate it with their name and why I know them. For example I remember you from the HDI conference as the guy who signed his book for me. This helps me associate  why I know you and what you do."

A Few Words of Caution

Try to avoid assumptions when using someone's name. For example, many people assume that I'm really a Jeffrey, so they call me Jeffrey in an attempt to sound smart.

The problem is my full name is Jeff. It's not short for Jeffrey, Jeffery, or even Geoffrey. So calling me Jeffrey backfires and creates less of connection than if the person had just called me Jeff.

I've made this mistake myself, calling Ronald "Ron," Christopher "Chris," or Jennifer "Jen." Today, I always take the other person’s lead and use the name they give me. Calling someone by a nickname without first making sure that's what they like to be called can unintentionally insult the person.

Years ago, another common concern was whether to call someone by their first or last name. Today, this is almost never an issue. First names are typically acceptable and often preferred. (This can vary a bit by industry or company, so it's not a hard and fast rule.) When in doubt, introduce yourself to your customer and notice what name they give. If they emphasize their first name, you know first names are okay.

Five Ways to Humanize Customer Service

Humanity in customer service is getting rare.

We shop online without ever interacting with a person. Go on a trip and you can check in for your flight, summon a ride to the airport, and check into your hotel room all from your smart phone.

Got a problem? There's a self-service portal for that. Try to call and an interactive voice response system will do its best to dissuade you from talking to someone.

Even when you do interact with a live person, it doesn't always feel that way. There's a whole class of transactional employees whose jobs are at risk of being automated because they don't add any uniquely human value.

Self-service is great and makes a lot of things easy. Yet there's still times when a friendly word and a genuine smile is needed to create an exceptional experience.

Here are five ways you can make sure that happens on your watch.

Start with Vision

Unite your team with a shared definition of outstanding customer service, called a customer service vision.

The vision should focus the team on people, not transactions.

Shake Shack was one of the customer-focused companies profiled in The Service Culture Handbook. The company's customer service vision is Stand for Something Good.

You can see this vision in action when you visit a Shake Shack. Employees are smiling, engaging, and helpful. Their humanity is contagious. Even at a crowded New York City location, you somehow find yourself enjoying other people.

Create Connections

Interesting things happen when service providers and customers see each other on a human level.

In restaurants, one study revealed that satisfaction increased 17.3 percent when customers and cooks were able to see each other. 

One of my favorite restaurants is Glen Ellen Star in the Sonoma Valley wine region. Here, you can sit at the chef's counter and have a conversation with the chef while you eat. Its website has a great video of this in action.

Find ways to help people who don't normally interact with customers make real connections. 

One exercise Clio used to develop its award-winning culture was a "Know Your Customer" campaign, where each person in the company interviewed at least one customer. The idea was help employees do their jobs with more empathy.

Give People Time

Time pressure often prevents human-to-human connections.

Employees feel the need to rush through interactions to get to the next person in line. People instinctively struggle to maintain a warm and friendly demeanor when they are focused on speed.

Increased staffing is one solution. Another way is to focus employees on first contact resolution. While counterintuitive when we're pressed for time, slowing things down can actually prevent additional contacts which frees up more time in the future.

Use Connecting Techniques

Help your employees develop specific skills to create human connections.

One of my favorites is the 10 and 5 Rule. This is used in retail, hospitality, and other settings where you have face-to-face customer interactions.

Employees use this technique by giving a non-verbal greeting to anyone within 10 feet. This can be a nod, a wave, or a smile. Give people a verbal greeting when they're within 5 feet.

Another option is the Five Question Technique. Employees think of five questions they can potentially ask customers that break the ice and uncover an additional need to serve. At least one of those questions will likely be useful in nearly any situation.

Create Human Procedures

Whenever I call for customer service, I like to introduce myself and greet the other person by name.

This often breaks the ice and creates a warmer interaction.

Some customer service reps must follow procedures that discourage them from doing this. They must follow a script that requires them to ask for an account number or some other information.

These procedures are typically created for efficiency. This can backfire if the customer bristles at the lack of warmth. Studies show that people are less open to ideas when they're angry, which means the interaction can take longer than it would if the employee was able to develop rapport with the customer.

Want to Practice?

These certainly aren't the only five ways to make customer service more human.

You can practice your human-to-human skills by making this a two-way conversation and leaving a comment or dropping me a line. Let me know how you humanize your service!

Confirmation Bias and The Power of First Impressions

First impressions set the tone. 

We all know that great first impressions are important in customer service. But exactly how do first impressions influence customers’ perceptions of service quality?

One factor is a powerful force called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias occurs when people have strongly held opinions. There’s a natural tendency to selectively filter new information, facts, and experiences based upon whether it confirms our opinion. We conveniently hang on to anything that supports our point of view while ignoring or dismissing any evidence to the contrary.

If you want to see confirmation bias in action, all you have to do is strike up a conversation with someone about politics, religion, or sports. Find out where they stand and then try to change their mind. Good luck.

In customer service, a strong first impression can form the basis for future confirmation bias. This can work in your favor if the impression is good or against you if the impression is bad.

Here are two examples from recent hotel visits:

Good example – Sheraton JFK

Evette greeted me as I arrived at the hotel shuttle pick-up area at New York’s JFK airport. I was tired from a long flight but her cheerful greeting immediately lifted my spirits.

“Hi! My name is Evette. I’m your greeter.”

The shuttle came on demand, so she radioed the hotel to request a shuttle to pick me up. Evette kept me company while I waited by giving me some additional information about the hotel and transportation options in the area. I was also impressed to see her helping people headed to other hotels find their shuttles.

Evette told me, “I work for the Sheraton, but it doesn’t cost me anything to help people going to other hotels since I’m already out here.” She was a great example of what Steve Curtin talks about in his book, Delight Your Customers. The spirit of service is separate from your job function, it’s voluntary, and it’s often free.

When the shuttle arrived she introduced me by name to the driver, Mike. It was a short ride over to the hotel where a friendly front desk associate named Livingstone checked me in. 

The positive first impression created by these associates did more than just start my stay off on a good note. It helped me form the opinion that this hotel offered good service. Once that opinion was formed, I became biased towards observing and remembering positive aspects of their service while dismissing or ignoring any minor occurrence that didn’t confirm that opinion.

Bad example – budget hotel

I recently stayed at a different hotel that created a less than stellar first impression. 

There was only one associate at the front desk to check in a long line of guests. I was tired from a long day of travel and the line felt like one more obstacle between me and relaxation. When I finally got to the front of the line, the associate seemed as tired as I felt while she plodded through the check in process.

To make matters worse, my key didn’t work when I got to my room so I had to go back to the front desk. Ugh.

This negative first impression left me irritated and tired by the time I got to the room. It gave me the opinion that this hotel provided poor service and it was all too easy to find additional examples throughout my stay. Each new service failure compounded my disappointment until I decided to document the problems on a short video.

Reality

The reality is I probably experienced a mixture of service at both hotels. The Sheraton JFK certainly provided better overall service but there were a few things they could have done better. I likely would have noticed more, or have been more bothered by what I did notice, if the first impression they created hadn’t been so good.

That other hotel also had some positive aspects too. There’s a very good chance I would have noticed more of them if the initial impression hadn’t been so poor. 

Most of perceptions about a company are really comprised of several experiences over time. This makes the first impression so important since it can serve as a reference for future experiences. I illustrated an example of this continuum in a post about Verizon that described how good service I had received was really a combination of good, outstanding, and poor experiences.

How to make a good first impression

Making a good first impression is usually easy if you follow a few steps.

Step 1: Observe first impressions from your customers’ perspective. This can quickly show you what’s working and what’s not. For example if you manage a call center, you could call to see how long it takes to reach a live agent, how easy it is to navigate the phone menu, what it feels like to be on hold, and what type of greeting you receive when you finally do reach a live person. You can use this same approach with many other types of businesses simply by tracing the same steps a customer would.

Step 2: Ensure you have adequate staffing to make a good first impression. Customers hate to wait, so immediately putting them in a long line isn’t the right way to get things started. If a wait is unavoidable, you can still employ a few jedi mind tricks to make the wait seem shorter.

Step 3: Learn and use customer names. Calling customers by name is a great way to make a customer feel welcome by personalizing the service they receive. Don’t forget that names are a two way street. Customers are much more likely to give service high marks if they remember your employees’ names.

Additional resources: Here are some other blog posts that also focus on positive first impressions:

• You lost me at hello

• How hotels can generate loyalty on the first visit

• Five question technique

 

Connecting rapport to five star service

Does rapport really matter in customer service?

I’m not talking about fake, going through the motions rapport. A wooden greeting at a retail store doesn’t quality. Neither does a robotic contact center agent reading scripted pleasantries.

I’m talking about genuine, “Hey, I like this person,” rapport.

There’s an objective way to find out. By combing through customer service surveys and online reviews, I was able to find proof that rapport influences customer’s perception in a positive way.

What is rapport in customer service?

The first challenge was defining rapport.

According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, rapport is a “relation marked by harmony, conformity, accord, or affinity.” In a customer service context, this involves connecting with customers in a way that causes them to see you as a real, likeable person.

Terms like rapport can be a bit squishy, making it hard to observe, quantify, and even train. One way to operationalize the definition of rapport is to count how often people mention someone by name in the comments section of your customer service survey.

I put that theory to the test.

Rapport improves customer perceptions

I started noticing a very specific trend around names while helping a client analyze their customer satisfaction data. Their survey had an overall satisfaction question where customers were asked to rate their service on a three-point scale:

1. Below Expectations

2. At Expectations

3. Above Expectations

A definite pattern emerged when I separated the comments section by rating.

Individual employees were mentioned by name much more frequently when customers gave their service an “Above Expectations” score. Here’s the distribution for one of the groups I worked with:

A much higher percentage of positive reviews mentioned an employee by name.

Another trend stood out. When customers mentioned an employee by name in a negative review, the employee was often mentioned as a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak encounter.

“Denise is always so nice and helpful,” said one negative review. The customer’s gripes were about wait times and procedures, yet they still appreciated Denise’s efforts to make things better.

Just for fun, I looked for other places to see if ratings were affected by whether customer’s knew employees by name.

The Yelp reviews for my favorite Italian restaurant, Antica Trattoria, showed a similar trend. Their overall rating is 4.0 stars with slightly more than half the reviews giving 5 stars.

However, you’ll see a familiar pattern if you look at the reviews that mentioned an Antica Trattoria employee by name:

My friends at Zendesk, a leading customer service software provider, provided analyzed nearly 2,000 customer surveys to see if this trend held true for other companies. It did!

Look at the difference when a survey mentions an employee by name in the comments, versus surveys that do not.

Barriers to Rapport

If rapport is highly correlated to outstanding service, why doesn’t it happen more often? One explanation might be that customer service professionals face a number of barriers that can make rapport-building difficult.

1. Speed. It’s hard to build rapport when employees are in a hurry.

2. Skill. Many people simply don’t know how to build rapport with customers.

3. Sales. It’s really hard to like an overly aggressive salesperson.

4. Task-focus. Rapport takes a hit when tasks are prioritized over service.

5. Customers. Some customers are jerks and resist rapport.

There’s also a concept called emotional labor. It takes effort to be nice to people. For some customer service reps, this is exhausting.

How to Build Rapport

You’ll have to remove these barriers if you want your employees to build more rapport with customers. Here are three simple steps to help your employees become rapport-building champions.

Step 1: Look at the Data

Review your customer satsifaction data to see how rapport might be impacting service quality. Do you see evidence of greater rapport in your top box survey scores? Are some employees consistently mentioned in customer service surveys while others are not?

Step 2: Observe

You can learn a lot by assessing the current situation before doing any tinkering. Watch your employees serve customers. Can you observe any of the barriers to rapport mentioned above?

Step 3: Engage the Team

Share your observations with your employees and ask them to help you find solutions. You might be surprised at how many good ideas your team can come up with. You’ll also notice they are more like to implement ideas that are their own.

In many cases, employees just need a little bit of training to help become more adept at building rapport. One of my favorite exercises is called the five question technique.

This short video from my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning explains how the technique works:

Starting a conversation from Customer Service Foundations by Madecraft and Jeff Toister

Make sure they know your name

You probably knew that you can personalize your service if you learn and use customer names. Did you know that customers tend to give even higher ratings when they know your name?

A review of customer satisfaction surveys reveals that customers who mention an employee by name are 2 - 3 times more likely to give the highest rating.

Tips to ensure customers know your name

1. Introduce yourself
2. Invite customers to ask for you personally if they need assistance
3. Hand a business card with your name on it
4. Write your name on a receipt
5. Use their name in conversation (it encourages them to remember yours) 

Remember that we all tend to forget names quickly without a little repetition. Find a way to remind your customer of your name a couple of times so it will stick with them.