The Science Of Customer Service

Years of research have shown that being rude or abrupt with customers has immediate and long term detrimental effects on engagement, commitment and future purchases, quite apart from its negative impact on workplace relationships, job and life satisfaction.

There is an experiment that will show you how your customer’s memory works, and how to turn the quirks of consumer memory to your businesses’ advantage.

You need to be blindfolded to stop you from cheating, from being able to write anything down until you are told to.

Your blindfold secured, you are read a list of cooking items: Tarragon. Lavender. Cardamom. Chicory. Safflower. Cinnamon. Turmeric. Marjoram. Don’t write them down yet! Let them settle into your memory.

Now: Take off the blindfold, and write down all the words you remember from the list. You were just walked through a traditional experimental demo, used hundreds of times each semester in introductory lectures by cognitive psychology professors all around the world. 

The point:  Imagine that each of a hundred people took this test without peeking. Which spices would they remember best? There’s a very particular pattern that researchers always see.

The result is known in psychology as the Serial Position Effect: People most clearly remember the first thing that they heard to them (Tarragon) and the last thing (Marjoram). The stuff that happened in between? Not so much. It is always a bit of a blur.

You might say, firsts and lasts are the real spice of life!

This insight provides us with a valuable shortcut in providing great, i.e., perceived to be a great customer experience. Here’s the takeaway from this simple experiment.

The way you greet and say good-bye to your customers are your “firsts” and “lasts”, their high points on the serial position effect. Handle them superbly, and your customer will recall, and perhaps even more important will describe to others, their overall superb buying experience. And they’ll be able to immediately call to mind specific examples of how your company was superb. Conversely, if you only excel in the middle of your interaction, you won’t get the credit for all your hard efforts.

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com