Small Service Ideas, Big Positive Impressions

Foreword

If you run retail outlets or showrooms to display your products, or you’re responsible for a government entity that serves the public, this article is bound to interest you. These are small things that won’t cost much, yet they mean a great deal to your customers and visitors — things that, once you provide them, will make a big difference in your customers’ experience. So would you like to get to know these small-but-big things? Give this article a little of your time. Jot down notes about the ideas you liked and intend to apply. Start gradually, applying one idea after another, only after confirming that the idea works and that the mechanisms you put in place to sustain it are sound. And remember: if you deliver service just like your competitors, that means a growth in your customer base is merely a possibility, not a guaranteed reality. Share your experience with us later, and suggest more ideas that fit your own culture.

On the other hand, ordinary readers will benefit from this article by raising their awareness — especially if I confirm, before you begin reading these ideas, that many of them are already applied here or there in far-flung corners of this world. I wish you an enjoyable read.

I’ll Leave You With the Ideas

• Provide a self-service station for customers. And if you don’t want to hire a dedicated person for it, you can install self-service machines for preparing coffee and its variations, so customers can drink whatever they like and serve themselves.

• Provide hot Arabic coffee with dates. The same employee who serves the staff can come around every half hour to offer coffee to the customers waiting in the designated waiting area.

• A water cooler — if not the kind with bottled water, then at least an ordinary cooler with paper or plastic cups provided, especially in this scorching summer climate. Not to mention that the best charity is giving water to drink.

• If families are among the visitors to your showrooms or branches, why not provide a small corner full of harmless toys where parents can leave their children while they finish browsing your showroom?

• Do your employees use the magic phrases: “Thank you for choosing us,” “Sorry for the wait,” “Apologies for the delay,” “I hope you have a great day”? Rest assured, you’ll be well taken care of. Between a thank-you and an apology, the customer feels a great deal of appreciation and respect.

• Professionalism is a way of life that many lack — whether from a lack of motivation, because of pressure, or simply because that’s how they were raised. Professionalism is a bundle of behaviors: respecting the customer, being honest with them, transparency, the desire to help them, thanking them, apologizing to them, calling them back when you’ve promised to, keeping any promise in general, never saying something that won’t happen, wearing appropriate attire, tactfulness, good-naturedness, paying a compliment, listening, replying to emails even when you’re not the right person to respond, welcoming the customer when they arrive and seeing them off when they leave, and looking the customer in the eye when they speak to you or you speak to them.

Speaking of eye contact, I once had an experience at a branch of a telecom company. All I wanted was to get a micro SIM card for a new phone I’d bought. From the moment I reached the employee until the service was finished and the card issued, he didn’t look me in the eye even once. You can imagine the level of irritation I felt toward him — but there was nothing to be done. Shall I add insult to injury? I asked the employee to give me the pin for opening the SIM tray on the phone. He pressed the spring button on his desk without uttering a single word, so I understood he wanted me to use that pin to finish the task myself! As the Levantine proverb goes: “The eye is a ladle for words” — meaning the eyes speak and express, and much can be understood from their movements.

• Avoid clichéd phrases. If you’re in a coffee shop and order a particular drink and the barista tells you “That’s a great choice,” that phrase is extremely clichéd and he says it to nearly everyone. But imagine if he told you your hairstyle was wonderful, or that your outfit was very elegant — how would you feel then? With some caution about using this technique in less sophisticated settings, since it could be misinterpreted.

• Do your employees call customers by their names? Or by their titles? That would please them far more than calling out “Hey Mohammed” or “Hey buddy”! Don’t you agree?

• Do your employees greet customers warmly? Do your employees answer the phone warmly — as if they were answering someone dear to them, while taking the customer’s mood into account?

• Make the customer feel important and special: How would you feel if a service employee told you, “I really love your name”? “I like your accent — may I ask where you’re from?” “Just for you, I’ll give you a special discount on such-and-such.” Wouldn’t you feel special if you heard phrases like these?

• Through your website, make sure to provide the coordinates of all your branches or showrooms, along with the working hours of each branch. Stay ahead of the game and add the working hours for holidays, public holidays, and feasts, as well as during the holy month of Ramadan.

• Have you thought about people with special needs — the deaf, the mute, and the blind? You can provide many things for them, such as a service employee who is fluent in sign language to communicate with them, at least in your main branch; special publications for the blind printed with special printers. Some organizations attend to even the simplest details — for example: a website whose font size can be adjusted to suit older people, or with multiple color options to ease things for those with color blindness, and so on.

• Provide a dedicated path for people with special needs to make it easier for them to enter and exit your branches.

• When the customer arrives at your premises, will they find someone to direct or assist them as they enter the branch? Will they find someone to greet them with a smile? These are all small things, yet they can leave a very bad or a very good first impression.

• The same goes for the contact center: in the speed of the response, the warmth of the greeting, the desire to help, and answering inquiries.

• Grant frontline employees more authority, even if that comes with some risk.

• Cleanliness — that the customer enters your branch as if entering their own home, or even somewhere cleaner than their home. What about the restrooms — pardon the mention — the most basic of human needs? Unfortunately, their condition is dismal in many companies and commercial centers.

• Sometimes you have to think outside the box. Imagine you owned a large chain of branches, like banks. Imagine you provided your customers with a massage specialist who would go around to each of them for five minutes, and in their downtime would massage your employees too. How wonderful would that experience be, in your opinion?

• A personal touch from the employee is needed from time to time, because the standardized scripts that employees repeat in certain situations come across as blatantly tedious. The employee can stick to a particular standard script and add a pleasant personal touch to it.

• Talking about personal matters gets everyone out of the dull routine. If you know, for example, that a particular customer of yours supports the Al-Ittihad football club, what would your employee lose by congratulating him on his team’s win last night?

• In third-world countries, the moment of closing the sale is the end of the relationship with the customer; in advanced countries, that moment is the beginning of the relationship. So have you ever thought about dedicating a portion of your sales or quality-control employees’ time to making calls to customers who recently dealt with you, to make sure everything went well?

• Take care of your frontline employees if you want them to take care of your customers, for they are your mirror and your company’s ambassadors.

• Look for curious employees, because the curious ones ask your customers many questions that can point you toward insights and observations your competitors don’t notice.

• One coffee shop dedicated special coffee cups to certain repeat customers, with their name or title inscribed on them. What do you think of the simplicity of this idea and its great effect on these customers’ hearts?

• Have you provided a first-aid kit — a mini pharmacy — that your employees or customers can benefit from in case of emergencies?

• Is your workplace adorned with ornamental plants, which some research has proven increase an employee’s productivity on their own by thirty percent? Beyond productivity, the aesthetic appearance instills a sense of reassurance in the hearts of visitors or customers.

• In many government entities, we suffer from the “the system is down” lie. Forgive me for calling it a lie, because it really has become an excuse for many lazy people who don’t want to work. What if a screen were placed in the branch dedicated to displaying certain indicators — among them a key indicator related to the system and whether it’s working or not — so that no fainthearted soul can falsely use this excuse?

• Proactive messages, in which you inform your customers of expectations regarding a delay in service or its unavailability, have great benefits in easing the intensity of anger. Have you thought about the kinds of problems you can tell the customer about before they tell you about them?

• Why are the sensitive terms in a contract placed in very small print? The contract should be in a uniform font of the same size. Having salespeople scrutinize the sensitive terms — by alerting the customer to them or highlighting them for them — is a cause for trust. What matters is not executing the sale, but the customer’s interest and their awareness of the risks of the contract, which must come above all else.

• The weather is very hot, or rainy, or cold with strong winds. If you have branches or government centers frequented by visitors that close during prayer times, what’s to stop you from opening your doors to let these visitors or customers wait inside? Even if there are external regulations, then you must lobby the regulator to change its regulations so they ultimately serve the customers.

• Without prior announcement, surprise your customers by giving them more than they deserve for what they paid.

• Store owners require bringing the receipt in order to exchange or return an item. Can you assume good faith and exchange a product for someone who forgot their receipt at home, after you’ve confirmed the product is intact? Is that difficult or costly?

• Likewise, assume the customer is being truthful if they tell you they found the product broken or defective when they got home, and exchange it for them right away.

• A very simple gesture, but one that is appreciated, is that when one of your customers sneezes, one of your employees rushes to hand them a tissue the moment their sneeze ends — to give them two Panadol tablets if they have a headache, or an effervescent vitamin C tablet if they’re feeling tired.

• Have you thought about placing a mirror in front of the employee so they can see the reflection of their own face from time to time and catch themselves whenever their expression turns into a grim scowl?

• The s-m-i-l-e: You make your customers happy with it, it is a charity and a reward for whoever offers it, and it costs nothing.

• In countries with diverse customer nationalities, like the Gulf states, there are dozens of ideas that can be used to delight these expatriates. The simplest is to congratulate a customer from a particular country on their country’s national day — that will leave a tremendous impression on them. Take a lesson from Google’s search engine in how this company tries daily to find an event worth celebrating and changes its logo to match it.

• What would you lose if you told one of your customers — when it shows in your system that the day of their visit happens to fall on their birthday: “Happy birthday, I wish you a life full of achievements and successes”?

• What about providing sweets for customers or visitors who come accompanied by their children? Even for the customers — if you saw your customer off with a piece of chocolate the way you see off your guests, wouldn’t that leave a positive impression on them?

• If one of your employees has a bad experience with a rude customer, let them rest a little before facing the next customer, because their negative feelings might transfer to the next customer, who is innocent.

• If you want more sales, make sure your employees are equipped with sufficient knowledge about your products. Organize quarterly contests with enticing prizes awarded to the employees who score highest in answering surprise weekly questions — a quiz.

• Visit your competitors’ branches and neighboring countries, and see how service is delivered there. Japan and Singapore might be a wonderful starting point to learn a great deal, and to think about how I can offer something better than what I saw.

• Monitor international experiences in the area of customer service through continuous research and by setting up some alerts on the wonderful tool offered by Google. You’ll find it at the following link:

https://www.google.com/alerts

From personal experience, and on several occasions, I’ve noticed that the level of service provided to customers at Jarir Bookstore is advanced compared to the general level in the region. From this platform, I extend special thanks to them for the efforts they’ve made in that regard, so #Thank_You_Jarir_Bookstore.

Conclusion

You can obtain dozens of other ideas from your own employees. Organize a contest for that and dedicate an enticing prize for the best ideas, which will be applied in reality. Or make it one of the stages of hiring someone who will work in your customer service, by asking them to give you ten low-cost, high-impact ideas — so you get even more. I ask God to make what I’ve written of benefit to you, and I hope to see in Arab countries a finer level of customer service. May God guide us to the right path.

I apologize again for centering the text. The right-alignment option isn’t available, and I’m currently in touch with LinkedIn’s technical support to solve this dilemma.