How Your Work Role Delights The Client

Hi there and welcome. I’m Kerstin Jatho, a transformational coach from 4Seeds Consulting, helping organisations and individuals to shift from languishing to flourishing. In this audio, I want to share with you how your work role delights the client. If you take the word delight, which is an emotion you think of joy, extreme satisfaction, light heartedness, being pleased about an outcome, and just absolute jubilation. We all have endless stories that we have encountered of poor customer service, where we have walked away, annoyed that our expectations weren’t met, and we go out and share it with others, repeating the story over and over.

Poor customer service has become the norm. Receiving average service has become acceptable to us. So we are not expecting at all to be delighted, hence to move that ball to delight a customer is actually not very high because most clients are not expecting it.

I recently bought a product. It was a simple product. I had to go to the store three times to go and pick it up. Then I had to phone a number on the guide that was given to me to activate it. That number told me to find another number. When I found the second number, it didn’t exist. I googled the number on the internet. Nothing could be found. I eventually had to go back to the store to have it activated. Something very simple took an endless amount of time.

And here I am telling you the story and it was expected. But it becomes quite unacceptable and it wears us down. So the question is, how can you delight a client? How can you exceed their expectation, and here perhaps are five tips of a way to do it. The first one is put yourself in their shoes, have empathy for the client who has a complaint or an enquiry or a query. They are not being difficult. They just want something to be resolved.

The second one is make the contact request seamless for the client. Don’t put them through from one department to another, have the call dropped or anything like that, make it a seamless request where you can try and service the client from A to Z in one. And if you can’t and you have to pass it onto somebody else, then go back and see if the request has been completed. Always be courteous and kind, and think that the client is not phoning you to make your life difficult or be mean or nasty. It is just that they react that way if they get irritated and don’t get service, or their expectations aren’t met.

So, come in with a point of compassion and empathy and kindness, and a smile in your voice goes a very long way. The fourth one is ensuring the request is fully completed, like mentioned before. If you’ve passed it on to a colleague or somebody else, make sure that it is completely solved for the client and phone them even to find out if there is anything else you can do for them, which leads into the first point of really checking in has this client’s requests or enquiry being resolved at the level and to wow. A client doesn’t take a lot of effort, it’s just to meet and exceed their expectations. And for that, you actually need to understand what is their expectation. So go out and delight a client. Think of it as an act of kindness when you service a client. It’s a win-win for both of you because in an act of kindness, both of you, when you feel good, when you’ve serviced somebody and given your best work and the client feels great because they’ve received excellent work.

Over and above that, they’ll tell everybody about the excellence of service that they’ve received, which surprised them. So, delighting a client equates to an act of kindness.

I would like to invite you to think on how can you surprise a client, not just going through the motions, doing the standard thing, but how can you raise the bar just a little bit and see what the reaction is.

And the thank yous that you’ll receive from a client. Maybe you’ll even get a testimonial or an email that you can pass on to your line manager.

Thank you for listening and I look forward to connecting with you in the next one.