The Best Word Customers Will Ever Hear
The Best Word Customers Will Ever Hear
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What is the best word that your customers will ever hear? Is the word
‘fast’? Is the word ‘free’? What is it? It’s obviously none of the
aforementioned words. To quote Harry Beckwith: “The word rings like
music to your customers’ ears.” Do you know what the word is yet? It’s
their name. In fact, this pretty much applies to anyone and not just
your customers. People love to hear their name. That’s why you may catch
salesmen use your name repeatedly. It’s suppose to warm you, he/she is
trying to build rapport with you.\
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After I heard Harry talk (I have the Audiobook of “What Clients
Love
”)
about customers and using their names, I thought about my own
experiences. Then I quickly felt turned off. You see, I go by either
“JP” or “Jon Paul”… but my first name is “Jon.” When my insurance agent
calls me, she asks: “hi Jon, how are you today?” When I receive an email
from AT&T, it begins with “Dear Jon.” Damn, even the doctor who has seen
everything and knows every little intimate detail about my health and my
body calls me “Jon.” It feels impersonal.\
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Most of you won’t care. Since your are part of a group of people whose
first name is what you are called. But you should care. I thought of an
idea as I was listening to What Clients Love. At first I was a bit
reluctant to share this idea. I wanted to be the first to person to do
this, but then I read: Ideas Into Execution: Giving Away An Idea To
Make It
Happen.
It is truly necessary to spread ideas, even trivial ones like the one
I’m about to propose. Spreading ideas is what can help start a movement,
make changes, and improve the world.\
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Why don’t businesses and web application developers just add an
additional field? You could label the field “nickname” or something
along those lines. The field could even auto-populate with the
customer’s first name for the 98% of those it won’t affect. But,
consider this: if you add this additional nickname field (any programmer
will tell you that adding and additional field to a form and then a
database is not that much trouble) and it helps to make your customer
feel better about your business then isn’t it worth it? Isn’t it worth
that small amount of time investment to make sure that your customers
know that you care? After all, isn’t business and selling all about
relationships? \
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Please share your thoughts. Do those of you with nicknames ever feel
this way when interacting with businesses?
You can follow me on
Twitter @jprichardson\
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-JP
If you made it this far, you should follow me on Twitter.
-JP