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Buenos Dias, Bonjour, Guten Tag
What is today besides the day-before-Thanksgiving day? It’s the 35th annual World Hello Day, which is observed by people in 180 countries and used as an opportunity to express their concern for world peace.
Anyone can participate in World Hello Day simply by greeting 10 people. This demonstrates the importance of personal communication for preserving peace.
Aside from preserving world peace, I think that World Hello Day can serve to remind us about the importance of keeping communications open on a local level. When is the last time you came out of your office to visit people in the contact center? Have you greeted your customers face to face in the stores lately?
CEOs like Brett Yormark, of the New Jersey Nets; and Greg Waldorf, of eHarmony, routinely speak one on one with their customers and employees. Yormark calls himself the “host” of the Nets basketball games, greeting fans at the gates and making frequent seat visits. He even gives out his business cards to season ticket holders. He says that getting in front of the customer is part of his customer strategy. “It’s like the maitre d’ where he makes your experience that much better. It’s about providing access,” he said.
Waldorf said he believes it’s important to physically work near the people who are the closest to customers: customer service reps. Customer service is located near his office, inside the corporate headquarters. “It’s a real benefit for me to talk to those agents,” he said. “My goal is for customer care to be as important a department as any in the company.”
For the Yormarks and the Waldorfs of the world, I congratulate you. If you're not one of them, let World Hello Day inspire you to get out and chat with an employee or customer. You might learn something new.
World Hello Day. What a great way to remind marketers and managers everywhere of the importance of customer feedback and interaction.
When I was the marketing vp at a small airline, many years ago, one of the things we used to do every day was record 30 minutes of a randomly chosen reservations agent’s inbound calls from customers, make ten copies of the tape, and distribute the copies to our various officers so they could play the tapes in their cars on their way home in order to hear what our passengers were actually saying to us. (If you do this, be sure to warn incoming callers that their conversations might be recorded for training purposes.) But I think whether or not you have a reservations office – if you have any kind of call center where real customers have a reason to call you, for service, for purchase transactions, or whatever – it might make sense to get your managers in touch with what customers are “saying” every day. It’s not hard to do.