Technology helps today’s businesses “know their customers”. They gather statistics about us all the time. They send us surveys and collect information through phone campaigns. They even send us “personalized” tweets and messages based on this data. All in an effort to entice us into spending our hard earned dollars with them. It’s a little creepy if you really think about it.
So, the question is – Are having all these facts about customers and using those details enough to keep them coming back? The answer is a resounding NO! No matter what type of business you work in customers want a personal touch, a real person who is treating them the way they want to be treated, for some people it’s warm and friendly for others it’s just the facts. A well trained customer service professional will be able to “read” their clients and know how to treat them accordingly. Not an easy feat, great customer service is fluid and hard to perfect; Employees need to instantly adapt to any number of different things that can affect the situation. Additionally, these so called soft skills are hard to measure. Try presenting to an executive that the reason you think business is up is that your frontline is making people feel special and generally pretty terrific about themselves and your business. But the bottom line is people return to a business not because the business knows about them. They come back because of their personal experiences with the business.