“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a lesson many of us learned as a child. You know, the idea that we should avoid making judgments based on outward appearance or other easily identifiable criteria.
Well, based on a recent New York Times article there may be some organizations that haven’t learned this lesson, or at least aren’t applying it to the way they do business.
There seem to be some organizations that are differentiating how they interact with customers based on gender or ethnicity, and while we’re all for differentiating service, doing it based on those criteria seems a little misaligned. While you certainly can differentiate customer interactions based on gender or ethnicity, this feels like lumping massive populations into communication strategies that likely don’t fit most, or even some, of the population you’re directing toward.
So how should you differentiate service?
A more accurate way to deliver this differentiated service is to provide Personality-Based Communication. That is, recognizing the communication style of the customer you’re interacting with and adjusting your delivery to meet that customer’s needs in the moment that you’re interacting with the customer. This approach requires a good ear (or two) and the ability to adjust delivery styles, but the payoff (decreased callbacks and increased experience results to name two) have proven to be nothing less than outstanding for organizations that deploy this approach.
Plus, one of the beauties of this approach to communication is that it works as well with internal constituents as it does with your customers. In the arena of coaching, the best coaches “flex” or adjust their delivery style to meet the needs of their representatives.
And to be clear, this approach to service (or internal conversations) is *not* about changing the message, but rather how the message is conveyed. And since we know that almost ¼ of all callbacks are driven by Experience Reasons, delivering messages in a way that a customer is most likely to understand and relate to shifts this approach from “nice-to-have” to “must-have”.
Differentiating communication? All for it. Just make sure you’re basing it on the right criteria.
CEB Customer Contact Leadership Council