Customer Experiences – Difficult or just different?

In sales and services careers, in fact in any client facing role, we get to interact with a variety of people, often from all walks of life, but sometimes not. Who you interact with will depend on what you do for a living and what markets you work in. However, what can be said is that you will always come across people who are different from you.

Interacting and working with people who are similar to us makes life easier for the most part. From the brain’s perspective it is efficient, it makes communicating easier as we share a lot in common even down to the way we dress and speak. However, it is when we need to work with or serve people who appear or speak differently from us, for example, that we might make assumptions and jump to conclusions about what they are like and this can lead to difficult interactions.

You can hear and see it when people react badly to differences, especially when under pressure, their communication usually breaks down and they can sometimes speak to or about the other person using derogatory terms such as calling them an idiot, or moron, etc. Sound familiar?

But it doesn’t have to be this way at all. Most people aren’t difficult, they are just different. Most people are seeking help and guidance from us. They simply want to buy something or use a service to achieve their own goals, and find someone, a business, they can trust and rely upon. They don’t want a fight or get into disagreements, that’s too distressful and what reasonable person wants that?

This is why it is important that we learn how to enter into any interaction, especially client interactions, with an open mind and an open heart ready to listen to, understand and help the other person. This means we need to be able to discern what they are thinking, what they are feeling, and what action they want to take with us.

Regardless of how similar or different they are to us, we can use effective human-centred communication skills combined with emotional literacy* to discern what they want when we listen and work with these three elements – thoughts, feelings, and actions.

When we communicate and work with people across these three dimensions, difficulties usually vanish, common ground is established, and solutions are found which all leads to great customer experiences.

* Emotional literacy is the ability to read or recognise your own emotions and the emotions of others so that you can figure out what they are feeling. It is different from emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) in that it emphasises the emotion of love, cooperation, and the common good which are ignored in definitions of emotional intelligence.[1]

Remember, everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_literacy

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