What’s Your “Good Customer” Quotient?
When I ask, “What’s Your ‘Good Customer’ Quotient?” I’m not asking how many good customers your company has. What I really want to know is whether you’re a good customer. I just spend a few days at the North American Conference on Customer Management, where the focus was of course on improving the customer experience to drive growth. One of the recurring themes was to hire people who are passionate about delivering stellar service. All the talk about employee behavior got me thinking about the other side of the equation: customer behavior. So I started observing.
What I found was that there's plenty of bad customer behavior. Just as we in the “customer” business go on and on about how easy it should be to deliver a great customer experience, we should also consider that it’s just as easy to be a good customer. It’s amazing to me how many customers don’t smile or make eye contact or say thank you for basic things. How many glasses of water are poured at restaurants where the server is summarily ignored? How many people are checked in boarding a plane that never even make eye contact or say hello or thanks to the person scanning their ticket? How many times do guests walk by hotel staff in an otherwise empty hallway and not even say hello? One simple smile can go an increadibly long way to make a more pleasant experience for both employee and customer.
I think customers need to take some responsibility for creating their own positive, face-to-face customer experiences. The Golden Rule applies in both directions.
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