Outstanding Customer Experiences – Why You Need to Anticipate Your Customers’ Needs
Anticipating your customers’ needs is one of the most important things you can do to build trust and truly rock it with your customer service! Anticipating your customers’ questions, challenges and needs shows you are treating them like a partner. Anticipating your customers’ needs demonstrates thoughtfulness and attention to detail. Here is a simple example of high-flying customer service in action!
Video Transcript: Anticipating Customers’ Needs
Several years ago, I was flying home from Toronto on an Air Canada flight when the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team were in the playoffs. I almost said Maple Leafs, but Maple Leafs? Playoffs? Who am I kidding?
The Toronto Blue Jays were in a playoff series, and the flight attendant did something so simple, but so thoughtful. She got on the PA and she said, “I know the final score in the playoff game, but I suspect some of you have recorded the game and you don’t want to know the score. Is that the case? Please put up your hand.”
Sure enough, a dozen hands fly up on the plane. “So, she said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. If you really want to know the score of the game, hit your flight attendant call button and we will run up and down the aisle of the plane and whisper the score to the people who want to know the score!”
And sure enough, attendant call buttons light up all the way down the plane. The flight attendants cruised down the aisle the aisle and whispered the score of the game to the people who pressed the call buttons.
How brilliant is that?
You know, when it comes to remarkable customer service, whether we’re talking about customer service internally to your teammates, to your boss, to your employees, or externally to your customers and clients, one of the hallmarks of great customer service is anticipating your customers’ needs.
When you anticipate their needs, it shows that you’re thinking like a true partner, that you’re thinking ahead of them. You’re thinking of things they hadn’t even maybe thought of. You’re anticipating their questions; you’re anticipating their needs before they even knew they had them!
That is a sign of remarkable customer service!
So, what about you? What do you do either internally or externally with your customers to show that you care enough to anticipate your customers or your colleagues’ needs, small things, do you do what small gestures do you do to show that you are anticipating their needs or their questions? Please leave a comment in the comment box.
Michael Kerr is a Canadian business Hall of Fame speaker and the author of 8 books, including The Jerk-Free Workplace.
