BUILDING RAPPORT WITH CUSTOMERS

Building rapport with customers is about building a positive relationship with your customer. It is the process of developing a mutual feeling of friendliness. You want your customer to feel like you understand them and to establish a level of trust so that they trust you will assist them in a friendly, efficient, and effective manner.

Let’s start with the customer’s name. You should ask for that first and then you should use it. It’s tempting to ask for their reference number or some other thing that makes it easy for you to look them up in your system, but you should always start with their name.

People like friendly people. If you are warm and friendly, your customers are more likely to respond to you with warmth and friendliness. Being cold and unfriendly is not going to help you build rapport with customers.

You should be flexible with formality when speaking with customers. This means you should match your level of formality to theirs. If your customer is businesslike and wants to get to the point quickly, then you should be businesslike and get to the point quickly too.

A big no-no in building rapport is leaving your waiting customer unacknowledged. If your customer is standing in a queue, make eye contact with them, smile to acknowledge them, and let them know you’ve seen them and will be with them shortly. It’s much harder to start building rapport with someone who has been standing in front of you for the last ten minutes whilst you’ve been ignoring them and deliberately avoiding eye contact.