Spend less of your time waiting at lunch

Lunch time in Hong Kong has always been a bit of a challenge. There are just too many people and too few food outlets. More often than not, I spend most of my lunch hour waiting in line trying to buy takeaway food.

What if there's a way where you don't have to stand in line to place your order or to pay? What if all you have to do is to stop by and pick up your order at a designated time? This is my suggestion for a scheme that requires a mobile phone and it works as follows :

1. You do a one time registration of your mobile phone number with the food store by sending it an SMS, it will send you a PIN number as confirmation.
2. At around lunch time, you send an SMS to the food store, and it will respond with a message : "1 - for same as what you had last, 2 - for the Daily Special, 3 - putting in the item code from the food menu yourself (for ordering from inside the food store or from the food menu on the food store's website)"
3. You make your choice, replying via SMS.
4. The food store will respond with an Order # and an estimated pickup time
5. If you respond with the PIN number you got when you registered your mobile phone with the food store (Step 1), the order will be charged to your phone bill. Alternatively you can skip this step and pay when you pick up your order.
6. You pick up your lunch at the estimated pickup time, quoting your phone number and the order #.

This will eliminate most of the queuing up : to place your order and even to pay. It should eliminate most of the cash handling at the food store as well, cutting down administrative costs and increasing security (less cash carried in-store). You and I can then spend less time waiting in lines and more time relaxing during our lunch hours!

Everything We Can

I picked up a copy of the Reader's Digest recently, first time for a longtime. It's really quite good. I came across this article titled "Two Mothers, One Message" by Maria Zulfiqar. It's about how she grew up in Pakistan and becoming a doctor. Therein lies a message that I find to be a terrific axiom for life : "we should do everything we can; the rest lies in God's hands."

Say Their Names

Working as a Customer Service professional is tough. Clients hold us to high standards. Some even hold us to unrealistic standards. Others demand the world just to see how much they can get away with. Most clients are quick to with their threats and yet few are generous with their praises.

I know. Trust me, I do.

We are all clients one way or the other in our daily lives. As clients we want things to go right, we want to be appreciated, we want to be looked at as individuals and we want to feel special. That's just being human. As Customer Service professionals, that's what we all want our customers to feel and there's a very easy and yet efficient way to get us at least part of the way there. As a matter of fact, it's SO easy that it's often overlooked.

USE YOUR CUSTOMERS' NAMES

That's right. As a matter of fact, slightly OVERUSE your customers' names. Greet them with their names. Address them with their names and thank them with their names. It's the easiest thing in the world. Say your customers' names. In the time you use to service each client, make it THEIR time. Using their names often is one of the most efficient way of doing that. Thank them with their names. Try it today.

Your competitors don't matter!

If you are a salesperson like I am, this is what I am telling you : your competitors don't matter, stop fixating on what the competition does and does not do. Fixate instead on what your CUSTOMERS do and do not do. That's right, your competition does NOT matter.

Customers don't make purchasing decisions based on the raw number of features your product has versus the number of features your competition has. Customers make their purchasing decision base on how well your product's benefits fit their needs. That is all. How does your product matter to them?

We as salespeople often find ourselves caught in a "feature comparison" trap, largely because our customers want us there. Customers love to pit salespeople against each other. They feel it's a good way to get the best deal out of us, not necessarily the best value but most certainly the cheapest deal. The truth is, customers make purchases more because something fits their needs better and it doesn't matter one bit as to whether these needs are real or perceived. Therefore it does not matter as to how many "widgets" a product have, the only "widgets" that matter are the ones that fill THEIR needs. Our job is to relay our product's benefits to their needs.

To win this game, we need to understand our client's needs. Who are they? What do they do? Who are THEIR clients? How do they make THEIR money? What matters to them? What are their hopes and fears? Until we understand their world, we won't be able to present our product benefits in ways that make sense to them. We won't be able to describe our product in their terms.

Until then, we can't consider ourselves as sales professionals. Think about it.