Ask, listen and learn

Your staff may be good at answering customer questions, but if they don’t ask questions, they’re just order-takers. Dr Ian Brooks has more.
I have been doing some mystery shopping lately and have been struck by two observations.
The first is how bad it is out there. You will remember last month’s column about being ignored at Bond and Bond and Farmers. Since then, I have been to look at boats with a friend who is thinking of spending about $100,000. It was a Saturday morning. Three marine brokers were closed.
One marine broker who was open should have been closed. When we walked in, the salesman was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He greeted us but did not get up to shake hands or introduce himself. When he found out I was originally from Canada, he was more interested in talking about a plane crash near Winnipeg than answering questions about the boats he had advertised on the wall. When we asked to see three boats, there was a great deal of shuffling through papers and discussions with a colleague about where the boats were. It turned out all of them were at other marinas in the Auckland area.
One brokerage had a sales dock. My friend and I walked up and down the dock looking at the boats, reading the information about the boats nicely displayed by each boat. We even walked onto the boats in the hope of being noticed but nobody came out from the office to talk to us. I walked back up the ramp to the office and found the salesman sitting at a desk. I stood behind him and, looking out the window said, “So, you can see the sales dock from here.”
“Yep,” he replied.
I told him my friend and I would like to look at one of the boats. He said that would be fine but he needed to “turn the phones over” – whatever that means. He did not introduce himself nor did he ask any questions about why we might want to look at that particular boat.
You have to give people a reason to buy from you and those kinds of experiences are not going to do it. By contrast, I was speaking recently at a sales conference in Australia. During the discussion, one fellow said he always gave new customers his mobile phone number and told them that if they had any questions or problems, they should call him directly and not ring the call centre. I could see from the expression on his colleagues’ faces they did not think that was a very good idea because he was opening himself up to being constantly ‘interrupted’ by his customers. At the awards dinner that night, he won six awards including Sales Executive of The Year.

Ask questions
My second observation is that even the good salespeople are capable of answering questions but do not seem very interested in asking any. This problem is not confined to the marine industry. I have mystery shopped car yards, retailers and other types of businesses lately and found the same thing. In the ‘good’ companies, staff are generally knowledgeable enough to answer the customer’s questions but rarely ask any of their own.
This tendency to be reactive creates several problems for the customer. First, it is hard work asking all those questions, trying to anticipate issues that might crop up in the future and generally thinking of what you need to ask about.
Secondly, we make dangerous assumptions if we do not ask questions. When I mystery shopped a car dealer I told the salesman I wanted to buy a car for my teenage son.
“The cheap cars are over there,” he told me, pointing to an area of the lot.
“Where do you keep the BMWs?” I asked.
The third problem with not asking questions is that customers are always right but often wrong. Customers buy because they have a problem or want to avoid having a problem. They are always right about their problem. They know they have one and they know what it is. Admittedly, they may, or could have, other problems they do not know about – but they do have at least one problem they know about or they would not be in the marketplace in the first place.
What customers are often wrong about is the solution to their problem. They do not understand your business as well as you do and so customers may, and often do, ask for the wrong solution. They do not know what other solutions are available and the pros and cons of each. Your job is to look past the customer’s request for a particular solution and ask questions to understand the problem they are trying to solve. That way you can affirm their request or suggest a better alternative.
If you do not ask questions, you are just an order-taker and there is no shortage of those.
But perhaps the biggest problem with not asking questions is that if you do not understand the customer’s needs, you cannot compete on value. If you do not compete on value, you will have to compete on price. And we all know where that road leads!
So that I practice what I preach, let me ask you some questions. What reasons do you give your customers to shop with you? Do your staff ask questions or fill orders? Do they understand the need to ask questions? Do they know which questions to ask?
Could these be good questions to discuss at your next staff meeting?

Dr Ian Brooks is a leading expert in customer care. Follow Ian’s blog at www.drianbrooks.blogspot.com