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Do you remember people's names?

Posted by: eleanor on 14-2-2012 10:37 am

To use the excuse, “I’m just no good with names” is just not acceptable if you want to make the best impression you can on the people you do business with. So how do you remember names?

Probably rule number one should be that you want to remember names. Think of it as a skill you are developing through practice. Dale Carnegie said that a person’s name is, to him, the most important word in the English language. If you can remember someone’s name, they have a more positive view of you, feel more important and are often prepared to overlook other perceived shortcomings. Here are some tips to help you memorize names:

In business, remembering your customers’ names is really important and provides you with a simple way to make the customer feels important and more prepared to listen to what you have to say…

1. Repetition is the key to memorization. When you meet someone new, on learning their name, repeat it silently to yourself 3 times. Immediately thereafter, relate their name to a person that you know, a celebrity or a funny story – this is called association and can be very helpful e.g. Marlyn (think Munroe) or Janet (as in Jackson)

2. Again, but this time aloud, use their name 3 times within the first conversation. i.e. "Michelle" is introduced to you and you would say, "Nice to meet you Michelle."
You could then introduce "Michelle" to another of your colleagues and finally when you part company say, "It was nice to talk to you Michelle".

3. While the name is still fresh in your memory, write it down in your diary/notebook along with a brief explanation of who the person is. This may seem like a lot of work but with practice you will learn to apply it almost instinctively. When you meet or speak to them again, they will be so impressed that you remembered their name.

Note: Remembering someone’s name requires a conscious effort to remember. Most of us have scores of thoughts, plans and assumptions on our minds all the time so someone’s name only gets a brief look in before it disappears off the radar…Tune in, in a very deliberate way, to the person’s name and consciously follow the steps above….

If we have forgotten someone’s name, we can ask them to repeat it without losing goodwill. Better to ask again than omit to use it at all or get it wrong!

The more we consciously practice remembering names the easier and more natural it becomes…

Have a good week
Eleanor

Outshine your Competition

Posted by: eleanor on 24-5-2011 6:32 am

Think back over the last week: when you bought your petrol or groceries, collected your dry cleaning or dropped in to pick up a takeaway, how were you treated? Did you feel appreciated, important? Did you feel good afterwards? Was it a pleasant, warm experience?

Research tells us (but we know anyway) that customers love to feel welcome, noticed, appreciated, respected. Customers will invariably choose companies who make them feel good - even if they have to pay more for their products or services. The question you might ask of your business today is, “How exactly do we make our customers feel welcome, noticed, appreciated, respected”? Today. Everyday. Everytime. It is simple...but it’s not easy.

You can make a customer a friend or an enemy for life in just a few minutes. Every moment of customer contact is important and adds to - or takes away from - the reputation of your company. So think about how you can improve their experience and give people a greater sense of being appreciated? How can you add to their day?

If you can connect to these emotional anchors, you will be building on bedrock as you will resonate with your customers on an emotional, meaningful level. Remember

· First impressions are moments of truth for customers

· Customers always appreciate eye contact and a friendly smile or greeting

· When a customer likes you he is much more likely to return

· Customers like to connect, it’s what makes us human

· No customers = no business

Everyone in business should be well-trained in the best ways to provide excellent customer friendly service. It’s the gatekeepers (frontline staff) who will determine how your customers view you – make sure they’re helping, not harming your business reputation.

Have a good week

Eleanor

What do your emails say about you?

Posted by: eleanor on 21-4-2011 7:04 am

We all agree that email is a superb communication tool: it's fast, easy, inexpensive and convenient. But there are dangers. Think of the disruption a critical e-mail sent in anger can create in the office. The recipient is annoyed and fires off a defensive reply and cc's it to the manager. The war of words begins and all hell breaks loose. Feelings are hurt and trust is lost and now the parties need to sort out the problem before it contaminates the entire office.

A confidential message is forwarded without permission. At the press of a button, a reputation can be shredded. The message can be misinterpreted and again, the situation can deteriorate very quickly. Once sent, there is no going back, people have been offended, the damage is done.

Email is a cold medium and every message we send has a 'tone', an emotional feel. When we need to send negative news or a refusal message we need to think about the probable response of the recipient first and then write with that in mind. Most 'problem' emails are sent in anger or haste so hold off while you are still angry. If you can, compose it in a word document first and leave it for a few hours. When you read back you will inevitably want to make some changes.

Email can help to build relationships and is a reflection of your professionalism and integrity. Use it wisely. Here are three tips for using email productively

1.   Don't send a message on impulse when you are angry and don't retaliate in haste to a negative email. Think carefully and leave time for reflection before you respond

2.     Sometimes it is easier and better to simply pick up the phone and discuss and clarify the issues

3.     Remember, everything you write says something about you and it is your responsibility to make sure that your emails reflect positively on you both professionally and personally

Service with a Smile – Ireland v Italy

Posted by: eleanor on 16-11-2010 11:26 am

The times they are a- changing! Service in Ireland is improving, staff are more helpful, there is a quality there I haven’t seen before. All good news and it is, I suppose one of the more positive aspects of our recession. Businesses are beginning to realise the value that service can contribute and staff are beginning to see how being more friendly, competent and nice to customers can help ensure that their own jobs are a bit safer.

It’s a pity that it takes a recession to make us all realise that customers are people and if you are nice to and impress them, they will come back to you again and again. And, they will tell their friends about you. And they will be prepared to pay over the odds as long as you can make them feel valued and important. It’s human nature. People like to do business with people they like and with people they feel they can trust. And the more you listen to customers the more they trust you.

Fergal Quinn, former Superquinn owner and curernt Senator, discovered this many many years ago. He walked around his store, asking questions, listening and responding to customers and changing what they told him needed to be changed.

He listened to staff. He rewarded them when they came up with good ideas, ideas that impacted positively on the all important customer. He made an art out of listening and treating his customers like diamonds. In his book “Crowning the Customer” he recounts a story where a woman returned to the store with meat she had purchased and considered to be “off”. Though the meat was perfect (he discovered that the smell was from the varnish her husband was using on furniture at her home) he graciously refunded her money and never tried to persuade her that it was in fact, her mistake. He understood that diplomacy would guaranatee loyalty.

We in Ireland, are certainly way ahead of our Northern Italian counterparts. I was on a cycling trip recently with the Irish Guide Dogs fundraiser and the service we received in shops and restaurants left me speechless. We encountered slow service, indifference and even rudeness in some restaurants and while there were some very impressive encounters with some staff, I began to realise that on the service front Ireland is marching steadily ahead. Irish people are naturally friendly. It is one of our great strengths: it is a friendliness that is easy, natural, and disarming and Irish people can inject humour into an encounter which is a wonderful talent.

One night in the Lake Como area, we dined in a hotel restaurant where the food was awful...and cold. When some of our group complained politely, the chef cum manager began to shout and swear, the noise from the kitchen was unbelieveable..and then he appeared – in a rage - and told us what he thought of us and ordered us to leave and never return. He actually warned one of our group - who met him while out for a cigarette break – that he was planning to upend all the tables and drive us out of his restaurant. And no, I’m not joking or exaggerating, it was incredible. Management had to be called to restrain him as he screamed and threatened us in a mix of English and Italian – it could have developed into a saloon type fist fight so easily! Thankfully, we all escaped with our lives.

I can’t imagine that happening here in Ireland and I’m sure it is pretty unusual in Italy as well.

We are told we need to spend more money here to counteract the dip in retail and hospitality sales and restore confidence to the market. Well, providing a superior, friendly, welcoming service will go some way towards encouraging spending so let’s hope we continue in the right direction - providing an ever increasingly better service to kicksart sales.

Have a good week

Eleanor

Time is money (your money!)

Posted by: eleanor on 7-10-2010 8:08 am

It really amazes me how people in business waste time – especially in these tough times when businesses have to be leaner, more productive, more accountable – time still gets frittered away. Time is money! It’s a worthwhile exercise to look at your business or even to look at yourself as an individual worker or manager and examine how much of your time gets wasted across a busy working day...and the effect of this wastage on you, your stress levels and the overall health of the business...

So where does time get wasted? According to a new survey by America Online and Salary.com, the average American worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and break-time. While companies assume a certain amount of wasted time, the survey indicates that employees are wasting about twice as much time as their employers expect. Salary.com calculated that employers spend $759 billion per year on salaries for which real work was expected, but not actually performed. That’s startling!

So what were the top three time wasters cited by the 10,000 respondents?

Personal Internet use: 44.7%
Socialising with co-workers: 23.4%.
Conducting personal business: 6.8%

It’s hard to understand though – if workers are wasting over 25% of their working day – how businesses can really compete and maximise their resources? The top three reasons employees give for this downtime are

Don't have enough work to do: 33.2%
Underpaid for amount of work: 23.4%
Co-workers distract me 14.7%

Are workers really expected to work 8 hours per day, non-stop? I shouldn’t think so. According to a Salary.com follow-up survey of Human Resource managers, companies assume that employees will waste 0.94 hours per day. However, those managers privately suspect that employees waste 1.6 hours per day. In fact, employees admit to wasting 2.09 hours per day.

Planning and organising time at work is critical. When we waste time, our working day is less satisfying and we pay the price through feeling bored, frustrated or overwhelmed – and the business pays... through revenues and customers lost. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Check out your own time robbers - do you use the internet to check out holiday offers or to do some online shopping or research? Do you link in to Facebook to catch a glimpse at the latest photos posted up by friends? (Just for two minutes, it won’t take long...!)

A quick chat can turn into a full blown conversation with colleagues, twenty minutes up in smoke! A coffee break can spill over into a half hour. A personal call can be very enjoyable and can eat into another fifteen minutes...a meeting scheduled to start at 9 am can eventually get going at 9.10 “ ...we’ll just wait for Mary, she’s just gone to get a coffee” and the meeting can drag on unnecessarily because someone has gone off on a tangent. You get the picture. Before you know it...it’s 5.30pm and you still haven’t got around to the tasks you set yourself....Ah well, there’s always tomorrow.

Brian Tracy one of the best sales and motivational speakers in the world puts it best in his time management gem; “When you’re at work...WORK”! This is the best time management advice I’ve ever heard. It is simple but these 5 words say it all.

Resolve to change your habits today. If you can do that, you will do two things for yourself: you will enjoy much greater satisfaction and better results from your day and you will enjoy peace of mind and lower stress levels, knowing that your day is more productive, less frustrating and more enjoyable.

Remember the Golden Rule: When you’re at work, WORK.

Enjoy your week