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Adding The Personal Touch

By: Rashid Kotwal

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Let me pose a simple question…

Given the choice, where would you spend your time:

a) With someone who makes you feel special

b) With someone who patently couldn't care less about you

The answer's pretty obvious isn't it? Of course you want to spend time with people who care about you and who you care about as well.

So why is it that so many businesses quite patently make you feel like "just another number". Someone they really don't appear to care about - and make you feel that your custom is not important? They don't appear to enjoy what they do and it shows (and rubs off on you).

I trust that none of you fall into this trap in your professional lives!

Ah, I can hear some of you muttering, "I'm too busy in my work to have the time to be nice to everyone. If I had to go out of my way to do something personal for each person I'd never get any 'real work' done".

Could I be confronting and say that your "real work" is in going the extra mile - because that's what people remember, come back for and recommend you for.

"But how can I create the time to do all this extra stuff?"

The answer is SYSTEMS.

Systems are not put in place to make you a robot.

Contrary to popular belief, systems allow you to streamline the mundane (so that you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel) and therefore free you up to do more creative stuff.

Systems provide structure, guidelines and methodologies without which no medium to large organisation could function.

Of course the trap is that you might get so caught up in your systems that you allow yourself no flexibility.

Let me illustrate with an example from our holiday break.

Between Christmas and New Year we were lucky enough to go on a 6 night holiday in Tasmania. For those of you not in Australia, Tasmania is a large island between the mainland and Antarctica. It's an absolutely beautiful place and I can't recommend a visit highly enough.

We'd decided to stay in Bed & Breakfast establishments (B&B's) rather than motels and hotels. B&B's give you the personal touch as you stay in a home with the hosts and you get a nice home cooked breakfast as well.

The first B&B was fantastic. The hosts were a lovely couple - they'd only been doing this 10 weeks and really loved it. We were treated to tea and homemade Christmas Cake on arrival, they made us feel really welcome and nothing was too much trouble.

Breakfast was a treat, home made jams, farm fresh eggs etc. Conversations with the host as to what to see and do.
The day we were leaving, they'd even booked us on a city tour and as the city was packed with the Sydney to Hobart Yacht race boats arriving and it would be difficult for us to park, drove us down and dropped us into the city. Now that's service! And yes, we'd go back in a flash.

The next place was larger and less personal. They had about 10 rooms - so treated it more as a hotel. While still welcoming, there was no tea on arrival and the rooms had packets of dry biscuits!

Breakfast was in a large dining room and far more like a hotel.

While the hosts were very nice people, they were much busier and some of the personal touch was missing.

Now for the last B&B.

We arrived and the husband found us the keys to our cottage. The wife was sitting right there by the pool but didn't bother getting up and greeting us.

There was basically no attempt at making us feel welcome.

We were "told" that breakfast was between 7:30 and 9am. I joked and asked what would happen at 2 minutes past nine. The straight faced reply was that they would be cleaning up and that breakfast was between 7:30 and 9am. Some flexibility, huh!

Breakfast was a bit lean. Not a lot on offer - and when the orange juice ran out - even though the host watched me pouring half a glass - not one attempt to fill the jug.

Barbara and I got the distinct impression that the hosts didn't want to be running this type of business any more and it showed.

Needless to say, we won't be staying there again.

So how could this relate to your business?

We all want to feel special. We want to "feel" that people are looking after us. Yes, these people all had businesses to run. Yes, they all had systems in place to make their lives easier. (If you think running a B&B or hotel is easy, think again!)

But it was the personal touches that made or broke the experience. It was going the extra mile especially when it was certainly not expected. Chris (our first host) certainly didn't have to drive us into the city.

What about your business? How do you go about making your clients feel like individuals - people you truly care about.
What systems have you got in place for keeping in touch?

What brings clients back to you time and time again? Because if they're not coming back - you're losing money - big time!

Don't fall into this trap! It's a very costly exercise and you don't even know how much business you're loosing.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Rashid Kotwal is an international speaker and author who specializes in on-line and off-line strategies for direct response marketing and sales optimization. He works with sales organizations want to get more business, faster and with less wasted effort. You can find more information at Sales & Marketing Consulting and Get Clients Online Fast. Copyright Rashid Kotwal.

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