When you are a one-person business, everything that happens does so exactly the way you want it to. But as soon as you have even one employee, things are going to be done two ways, at least some of the time.
There will still be the way you do it, when you do it, but then there will be the way the employee does it, and that might be different than your way, and it might be different in a way that you’re not OK with!
I stopped at a restaurant yesterday to pick up some food and was greeted at the counter with “Hi Love, what can I get you?”
It wasn’t because I had a close personal relationship with the cashier; I’d heard her greet the two customers before me the same way.
I am positive that isn’t the way she was originally trained to greet customers, but obviously she decided to change it up a bit and go off script.
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It’s not that I was offended or upset by this, but it did strike me as probably not the tone that the business would have wanted. And that’s because I can imagine a certain percentage of customers not appreciating that and a few taking it the wrong way.
I assume the problem here is that the manager of the store has heard this but didn’t bother to correct it, and so now it’s a thing. Which isn’t great, but at least they had training for this and are at least trying to standardize their service the way they want. Now they have to work on follow up.
For the vast majority of small businesses I see however, they don’t even have the first step down- setting out what they want to happen and training the employees accordingly.
If you don’t tell your people exactly what you want and set clear expectations, then of course you’re going to get whatever they come up with on their own. Which may start out as copying what they hear you do, but then may quickly morph into their own version of it which may no longer be what you want.
I know it sounds like a lot of work to script everything you want an employee to do in terms of customer service, but in fact, there aren’t that many variables and situations you’ll need to address. But if you don’t bother at all, it’s your business, revenue, and reputation that will suffer, so the very small investment of time is 100% worth it.
If you don’t, then you’ll eventually have your employees- the face of your business as far as your customer is concerned- greeting the next person in line with “what do you want?” as I have personally experienced as well. And it wasn’t a friendly “what do you want” but more of a “I’d rather be sticking a fork in my eyeball than here doing this right now, but since I don’t have a fork handy, I will very reluctantly take your order” kind of vibe.
If you are reading this thinking yes but I only deal with customers online so this doesn’t apply I’d say not true! Written communication with clients is just as important so taking the time to write out appropriate ways to respond to written inquiries is very much worth doing. You would be shocked (or maybe not) to see some of the email communications we’ve gotten from businesses and the people they have behind the keyboards helping customers. You don’t want to come across like this yourself- every customer is too precious to let slip away over a poorly written email.
The only way to get the service level you want from a business that is bigger than one person is to provide clear training, then follow up and make sure your directions are being followed all the time. If you don’t, standards will slip and the business will suffer.
Since this is such an easy fix and because customers will pay more to shop at and work with businesses that treat them well, this is a competitive advantage you should never give away!
