Choose Your Words Carefully - Transmission Digest

Choose Your Words Carefully

Whether doing business with strangers or longtime customers, the same rules of etiquette need to be applied. We never want to take liberties and feel that we can talk to customers the way we do our golf buddies. People can be easily offended, and it would be a shame to lose sales because our sense of humor doesn’t match our customers’ or because we don’t control the use of inappropriate language. Even if the customer is using off-color words or phrases, we cannot take that as a cue that it’s OK to join in.

Choose Your Words Carefully

It's Your Business

Author: Terry Greenhut
Subject Matter: Customer relations
Issue: Language use for maintaining integrity
  • Author: Terry Greenhut
  • Subject Matter: Customer relations
  • Issue: Language use for maintaining integrity

Whether doing business with strangers or longtime customers, the same rules of etiquette need to be applied. We never want to take liberties and feel that we can talk to customers the way we do our golf buddies. People can be easily offended, and it would be a shame to lose sales because our sense of humor doesn’t match our customers’ or because we don’t control the use of inappropriate language. Even if the customer is using off-color words or phrases, we cannot take that as a cue that it’s OK to join in.

As a professional in your trade you have established an image that you need to maintain. When customers come to you, the first thing they want is your counsel, long before repairs and services are ever performed. As a counselor you are looked up to, sort of put on a pedestal, and that’s exactly where you need to stay. Once you step down from it and try to become the customer’s equal, you’ve detracted from your celebrity, your image. If you lose that edge you don’t get it back. Remember too that you are not there to become the customer’s best friend, you are there to repair his or her car and earn your profit for doing so. The friendlier you become with customers, the more it usually costs you because they start asking for breaks. You’re better off keeping those relationships at arms length.

Questions are your friend

Better to ask than tell. When you make statements you are telling, which is the equivalent of teaching and you are not there to teach customers what you know. Statements push; they push your ideas and concepts onto people. Many don’t take kindly to being pushed. They feel as if you are backing them into a corner, trying to force them to do something they don’t want to do.

When you ask questions, you are pulling them along with you, and most don’t mind that. For example, if you were to ask, “Quality is a major concern of yours; isn’t it?” Most customers would agree with that. They would say, “Yes, quality is important to me.” So you’ve made your point, but by forming it as a question, you got him to agree with it, which is just as good as if the customer came out with the statement, “You know, quality is a major concern of mine.” There are so many opportunities to use questioning techniques that you should hardly ever have to make a statement. In fact, if you are talking with a really good salesperson, you will probably never hear him or her make a statement. Everything they say will be in the form of a question.

One of my favorite questioning techniques is to offer a choice from two or three positives. When offered choices people usually choose from one of the choices given; so if all of the options you give are designed to get you the answer you want, you will probably win.

  • “Can you bring the car in now or would 2 o’clock be better for you?”
  • “Will you be taking care of this with cash or using one of your credit cards?”
  • “Would you like the car ready by tonight or will you be picking it up tomorrow?”

Notice that each of these questions was closing for something. The first was closing for an appointment while the second and third were closing for the entire sale.

Asking questions doesn’t usually upset people. Asking what they do for a living or where they originally come from can often lead to an entire conversation which, if you’re listening carefully, can give you clues to how they will react when you eventually try to close the sale. Of course, if you live in Florida like I do and play golf with guys who are mostly in their 70s and 80s, the question you don’t want to ask, especially early in the round is, “How are you feeling?” That one can prompt three or four hours of how many bypasses and stents they have, who their doctors are, how Medicare and Social Security are cheating them and so on, so choose your questions carefully.

Listen

When you are selling you are performing. You’re on stage, which means from the beginning of your act till the end you have to maintain your high level of professionalism and your pleasant, friendly demeanor. It may not always be easy but it’s always necessary. Customers will taunt you. They will try to draw you into their problems but you can’t let it happen. You can’t become emotionally involved because then you are part of the problem, not the solution. You need to stand back and be clinical, just like a doctor would. Let them talk; you listen; that gives them the least number of opportunities to try to contradict you. The less you say, the more thoughtful you seem, and the smarter people think you are.

One thing you always have to remember is how upset people get when they think they are going to have to face a big expense to get their cars repaired. Why wouldn’t they be? The prices today, compared to what they were 10 or 20 years ago, are outrageous, but they need to be what they are so that our shops can sustain themselves and still be there to serve the customers. While it isn’t our fault that the prices have risen so much, customers will try to take out their anger and frustration on us, especially if our interaction with them doesn’t go too well or if there is something wrong with the repair we performed on their car. It is extremely important in those instances that we maintain a good attitude and never let them see that anything they are saying is rattling us or taking us down from our professional pedestal.

They are right, after all. The customer is always right! No he isn’t; but he must be made to feel that he is. Arguing to make yourself right especially when a customer is obviously upset about something that went wrong does nothing but alienate him. One of my favorite lines to use when I think the customer is wrong is, “You could very well be right about that, but let me ask you this?” Then I throw in a question that takes him off in a totally different direction, which essentially changes the topic of discussion. By telling the customer he may be right you are not making him wrong and although continuing to argue the point of contention isn’t going to get you anywhere because people don’t change their minds when they think they are right, starting down a different road might.

The fact that people don’t ever actually change their minds is a very important point to remember. The more you try to get them to, the harder they will fight to defend and maintain their position. They may, however, form a different opinion if new information is added. That way they are not being asked to change their position, just to decide on an entirely different issue that usually yields a much better result.

Stay positive

A major mistake that many service advisers and owners make is to knock other shops. If they find something on a customer’s car that was supposedly fixed by a dealer or another shop that they don’t think was done properly, or if the customer says anything negative about a previous repair, some advisers immediately go on the attack thinking they are building themselves up by tearing the other guy down. Well, it really doesn’t work that way. Here’s the logic behind it. When you knock another shop you also knock the industry that you are a part of, so it reflects just as badly on you. In addition you are, in a round about way, telling your customer that he or she wasn’t too bright for taking the car to someone like that, so they can take your comments as a personal affront.

Rather than knock others, you really should only talk about what you do. Even if the customer talks about how bad another shop is, don’t join into the knock festival. Say instead, “I can’t tell you what other shops do; I can only tell you what our standards are and how we maintain them.”

Don’t say it’s easy

When discussing your diagnosis with the customer, don’t ever make it sound as if the fix is easy. Think to yourself that you have never done this particular type of a repair before even if you’ve done it a thousand times and therefore don’t really know exactly what you’re going to run into. If you make it sound too easy, they will expect you to finish it faster and therefore pay less, but they will also be unprepared if something goes wrong so it is not finished quickly or costs more.

The time to tell customers everything you know about the job you are doing is when it’s done, when they are paying and picking up the finished car because that is the only time when you know all the answers. Anytime before that you are only speculating. People love to hold you to the promises you make and they treat everything you tell them as a promise.

“You need it,” are three very important words. When you want a customer to buy a certain service or repair, it is vital that there is some urgency to do so created in their minds. Saying something like, “It would be a good idea to have this taken care of,” or any means of presentation that is on the wishy-washy side, leaves the customer with too much of a chance to say she will put it off, but saying, “You need this done now” or words to that effect doesn’t leave much if any doubt that it should be done and right away.

We always need to remember that customers come to us for our advice and direction so let’s make sure we not only point them in the right direction but that we also lead them all the way there.

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