by Shep Hyken
How do they do it? There is one powerful universal communication tactic that Ace executes at a world-class level when it comes to engaging with its customers: the tactic of using effective open-ended questions to launch and sustain dialogue.
An open-ended question is one that elicits more than a yes-or-no response. Most service providers get the initial exchange with the customer off to a poor start by asking a closed-ended question like, “Can I help you?” Consumers are already in the habit of offering a response like, “No, thanks, I’m just looking.” Avoiding a closed-ended question may seem to you like a rudimentary concept, and if it does, you’re right. This is a very basic tactic, but it is one that is overlooked all the time anyway.
As I mentioned above, Ace excels in creating quality conversations, and they start those conversations with open-ended questions. These questions are delivered with tonality and body language that communicate an authentic interest in the other person. The body language and the tonality take a little practice, but the open-ended structure of the questions Ace associates ask is something that you can master almost instantly. Here are three classic Ace questions you can easily adapt to your world:
What can I help you find today? This question automatically steers the conversation toward the Ace brand promise, helpful, and appeals to one of the most likely reasons a customer is walking into an Ace store in the first place: to solve a single home repair problem or find a single product. You can easily adapt this question to just about any situation; you might ask customers, for instance, what you can help them learn more about, or what prompted them to reach out to you.
How are you going to use this? This query helps the Ace associate determine if there is a larger issue that the customer is really trying to solve. If there’s one thing customers like talking about, it’s the problem they’re facing right now. This question gives the customer an invitation to share all the relevant details.
Who is this project for? If there is more than one decision maker involved in the purchase, this question will usually uncover who it is. That’s important information!
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that these powerful questions are limited to retail settings. They can cross over to virtually every industry. They give you the “who, what, when, where, and why” of what the customer is looking for.
An open-ended question that creates engagement should come right after your first impression. (See Tool #26: Manage the First Impression.) You can greet the person and set the tone for what’s to follow and then immediately engage with open-ended questions to get information that will help you begin to amaze the customer.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Effective open-ended questions can help you launch and sustain a dialogue with customers and prospective customers.
Asking customers what you can help them find or learn more about lets you know the reason they are there or have called you.
Asking customers how they’re planning to use what they’re looking for gives you additional information you need to help them.
Asking customers who the project or purchase is for may tell you whether others are involved in the decision-making process.
THE DRILL
What’s the first question you ask a customer to start a conversation and find out what you can do to truly help him or her? (Hint: It’s not, “Can I help you?”)
How does that question help you engage with the customer?
ASK THE EXTRA QUESTION
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Questions are a powerful way to understand expectations, gain clarity, and avoid misunderstandings.
WHAT USUALLY HAPPENS WHEN a customer asks a question?
He or she gets an answer. (The right answer, we hope.)
However, sometimes just getting the right answer to a question isn’t enough. That’s because sometimes the customer may be asking the wrong question.
For example, a customer may ask for something to be taken care of “quickly.” Unless you ask, “How quickly?” you have no idea of what the customer’s expectation is. Quickly to him or her may be five or ten minutes. Quickly to you might mean an hour. If the customer’s expectation is not identified, and then met, you risk having a Moment of Misery.
So what’s the solution? Ask an extra question.
The people at Ace have a best practice that matches up with this principle. It helps them deliver a Moment of Magic virtually every time a customer asks a question. They know that just answering the question is not enough, so they ask another question of their own.
This critical best practice is reinforced constantly with frontline service providers—and everyone else, for that matter. It’s one of the things you learn to notice about a great service organization: They keep interacting with you after they’ve done the bare minimum of answering your question.
This actually happened to me at my favorite Ace Hardware, near where I live, in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. It happened a few years ago. I was doing a small home repair project, just as most Ace customers do. This particular project involved a small hinge component that had worked its way loose on a swinging, saloon-type door in my home. That little “doohickey” had bent and come right out of the wall, and it needed to be replaced.
I took the broken part over to my local Ace store, showed it to Matt, the young man who had met me at the counter, and asked him whether he could point me toward a replacement part that matched the one I had in my hand.
“I sure can,” Matt said. With those words, he had met my basic, minimal expectation. He’d answered my question. The part was in stock. Now if he could just show me where to find it, I’d be a happy man.
Matt did more than that, though. After he took me over to exactly where that replacement part was located in the store, he did something amazing. He continued the conversation by asking an extra question.
Matt said, “Just out of curiosity, what are you using this for?”
To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really been expecting that question, because, like a lot of Ace customers, I had just one thing on my to-do list. I wanted to buy that replacement part, return home, fix my door, and move on with the rest of my day. But something about the way he asked made it clear to me that Matt was on my side. He didn’t just want me to buy what I wanted. He wanted me to buy what I needed.
So I told him all about my project, about the swinging door, and how the little hinge had worked its way out of the wall. I told him that I was going to screw the new hinge in where the old one had been.
Matt thought for a moment, then said, “Well, you can do it that way, but the problem is, it’s going to come right back out again. Maybe a month from now, maybe six months or a year from now, but it will. And when it does, you’re going to be right back here again, looking for the same replacement part. There’s another way to fix it that will keep your swinging door on its hinges for a lot longer. Can I show it to you?”
Talk about a Moment of Magic! Of course I said yes. Of course I followed Matt’s recommendation. And of course any time I have a question about a home repair project, I go back to that Ace store. You know who I’m looking for: Matt! (Actually, though, Matt is one of a half-dozen people in that store who would have had the same kind of helpful conversation with me, with the same outcome.)
What might have happened in another hardware store if I asked, “Do you have this part in stock?” You guessed it. Typically, the counter person would have glanced at the part I’d brought in, looked up at me for a moment, and said something like, “Aisle 19, on the left, three-quarters of the way down.” I’d have gotten the right answer to my question, but I would have been left completely on my own. Matt didn’t leave me on my own. He continued the conversation. As a result, he saved me a lot of extra work—and won a customer for life.
I love this story, not because it stood out as an exception, but because it perfectly captures what Ace is all about: Helpful. I’ve shared this story with many people. That’s one of the things that happens when you cons
istently exceed your customers’ expectations, by the way: They tell people all about what happened!
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Ask the extra question(s). Sometimes a customer says one thing but may mean something else. If you don’t ask, you won’t know.
Once you answer a customer’s question, continue the conversation. Listen for more information that allows you to give a better answer.
Some customers think they want one thing, but need something else. Ask questions, listen, and help them understand what they need.
Ask about the customer’s problem and solve it. You could win a customer for life!
THE DRILL
When have you asked a customer a “follow-up” question that uncovered new information that allowed you to help the customer in a way you would not have done otherwise? (Often, these are questions that begin with words like, “Just out of curiosity …”)
If you haven’t asked that “extra question,” what could you have asked?
ONE TO SAY YES, TWO TO SAY NO
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Empower your people to come up with a solution.
IT’S EASY TO SAY, “I’m sorry, we don’t have that … We can’t get it … We can’t do that … It’s not our policy,” and so on. In other words, it’s easy to say “No.”
But that’s not what great companies do. Great companies empower their employees to find solutions for their customers. They teach them to “think outside of the box” for the benefit of the customer. And, they make them feel comfortable enough, if necessary, to find a manager or leader who can help them say “Yes,” before they have to say “No.”
At Ace, a single associate can’t just say “No” without exhausting all options. It takes two people to say “No,” and one person to say “Yes.” A “No” requires approval from the manager!
This approach has been around for a long time, but I had never seen it in action. After discussing it in one of my interviews with Jay Heubner, Ace’s Director of Retail Training, I started noticing that other companies were embracing the approach, and even calling it the same thing.
This may be the ultimate expression of a customer-centric philosophy. You’re asking the employee to figure out how to get or give the customer what they want or need. Suddenly, the employee is all about solving your customer’s problems, not getting out of the conversation. A nice by-product of this practice is that it cuts down on employees having to “get a manager’s approval.”
The story about Josh in Tool #11: Don’t Take the Easy Way Out, is an excellent example. That was where the customer, Judy, called to buy a lawnmower that the store didn’t stock. Josh, the associate, didn’t have to go to his manager to ask if it was okay to call the Toro dealer. To him it was common sense to make the call, which turned into a sale.
There is another by-product, and this is huge. When an employee feels he or she has to say “No” to the customer, the manager may be able to show them how to say “Yes.” That becomes a real-time learning experience that the employee will be able to use the next time he or she encounters a similar situation.
You want to have a culture that never takes the easy way out and has the amazing customer-centric mindset against automatically telling a customer No.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
The goal is to say YES! Create a culture that makes it mandatory for TWO people to sign off on any denial of a customer request.
It’s easy to say “No” to a customer, but that’s not what amazing companies do. They find ways to say “Yes.”
One to say yes and two to say no is an empowerment strategy. Train employees to provide solutions on their own!
When employees seek out a manager to get approval, it should be a teaching experience, with no approval needed next time.
THE DRILL
Can you think of a time when it would have been much easier to say “No” to a customer, but you found a way instead to say “Yes”?
How did you feel?
How do you think the customer felt?
CROSS-SELL AND UP-SELL!
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Trust makes all the difference.
CROSS-SELLING IS WHAT YOU DO when you suggest that a customer who’s already buying something from you buy something else from another department. Up-selling is when you suggest that a customer buy something related to what they are already buying from you. In both cases, you are asking the customer to buy something they hadn’t thought to buy.
For example, if you have a checking account at a bank, the teller may suggest that you see someone in the residential mortgage department in the offices next door who can help you secure a home loan. (That’s a cross-sell.)
Or, you might be at a nice restaurant and the server suggests an appetizer that the restaurant is well known for. You weren’t planning to order the appetizer, but the server convinces you to do so. (That’s an up-sell.)
In both cases, there is the opportunity to grow the bottom line of a business, but more importantly, these are opportunities to create a better experience for the customer. And, here’s the most important part: If they know they could create a better experience for the customer, and they don’t do it, they are doing the customer a disservice.
Most people think that the cross-sell or up-sell is just more selling. Even though the word “selling” is here, it really isn’t selling. It’s servicing. That said, there are definitely some people who may be better at it than others. You can have a training class on this, and I’m sure that because of that word “selling,” it may appear to be sales training. However, if you think about this in terms of amazing your customer, you will find that it takes on a different look.
If you go to your local Ace Hardware store to buy paint, and the sales associate doesn’t ask you if you need brushes or a drop cloth, that sales associate is doing you a disservice. One of the most powerful strategies Ace uses is to make sure that if you come in for a project, you leave with everything you need, so you don’t have to make extra trips to Ace or any other store. That may include recommending items you didn’t know you needed. There’s nothing high-pressure or “sales-y” about recommendations like that. That’s just one neighbor helping another neighbor.
Ace associates learn two critical principles when it comes to cross-selling and up-selling. First, they should only recommend that a customer purchase something else from them when they are 100 percent certain that it is the right thing to do. If they ever make a recommendation that violates that principle, they’ll destroy the trust they’ve built up with the consumer. Second, if they know for sure that buying a certain product will save a customer a headache, or another trip out to the store, they must recommend the purchase. It’s a dereliction of duty not to!
Regardless of your business, if you don’t ask questions or make suggestions that will enhance the customer’s experience by leveraging your products and or services, you are missing a great opportunity for amazement.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
To not cross-sell or up-sell your customers is doing them a disservice. Done right, this is not sales. It’s customer service.
Only recommend that a customer purchase something else when you are 100 percent certain it is the right thing to do.
If you notice a purchase that you know would help the customer, and you don’t recommend it, you have failed the customer.
THE DRILL
Think of a time when a customer was thinking about purchasing one thing, and you made a “cross-sell or up-sell” recommendation that helped the customer to do and accomplish more by buying more. What would have happened if you had not made the recommendation? Would the customer have been better off or worse off?
LAST IMPRESSIONS
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Leave a great lasting impression!
THIS IS ONE OF THOSE critical Moments of Truth that is all too easy to overlook.
Earlier in this section (Tool #26: Manage the First Impression) we covered delivering a positive first impression, and how it is
extremely important in terms of our overall engagement strategy with the customer. Just as important, if not even more so, is the last impression—because that’s what will leave the lasting impression.
If we make sure the customer’s last experience during the service encounter is a positive one—an above-average experience, an amazing experience—then the customer will self-reinforce that positive emotion on our behalf for a long, long time after the actual transaction. Maybe that positive reinforcement will express itself during the ride home when the customer thinks about how nice it was to have someone who smiled, who listened, who helped the way we did during the last few moments the customer was with us.
Maybe it’s as simple as the positive “Goodbye, and have a great day!” that comes at the end of a phone call that makes the customer feel that the company appreciates his or her business. Or maybe, right after an online purchase, the customer who’s concerned about whether or not everything processed correctly while placing the order finds an email message from us almost instantly after hitting the “Confirm Purchase” button. That email tells her that her order has been placed, that everything is in order, and that she doesn’t need to do anything else. Based on that one timely email, she congratulates herself for picking the right online store to order from. That’s the power of the last impression!