Customer Excellence

A little Turkish delight

On Turkey’s Old Silk Road Dr Ian Brooks is reminded of three age-old lessons on customer service and sales.

I’m writing this column from Turkey where I have spent just over two weeks driving from Istanbul to Gallipoli, down the Aegean Coast to Ephesus and then across half of Turkey following the old Silk Road. I have been to tourist destinations and to places where a six-foot-four Kiwi with red-headed wife are clearly rare sights.
We have shopped in bazaars, dealt with people in large and small hotels and wandered around the local shops in small towns. It did not take long to realise that Turkish business people understand it is about the customer, always! In fact, they could teach us Kiwis a thing or two about customer service and sales. Specifically, they could teach us three lessons:
1. Business is a social activity between people.
2. Your best customer is the one you have already got.
3. Price is the last thing to talk about.

Turks understand business is a social activity between human beings so they first relate to their customers as people. Before talking about their product or service, they want to talk about you. Where are you from? What is your name? What do you do for a job? Do you have children? How long does it take to fly to Turkey from New Zealand?
They don’t just go through the motions of asking questions either. They discuss your answers and will try hard to make a joke to get you laughing.  
We could debate whether this is a ruse to get you to buy or whether they are genuinely interested (I personally think it is the latter) but the point is Turkish business people understand the need to build a relationship first.
Of course, in New Zealand we also know that relationship-building is critical and that customers want to do business with people they like, who are friendly and helpful. The difference is Turks do it – consistently.
As a transient customer not likely to be revisiting a shop or hotel anytime soon, I did not think customer retention would be very important to the Turks I would be dealing with. But one day, in a city called Kayseri, well off the tourist route, my wife and I were looking at the walls of an old castle in the city centre. A man about 50 years old, who spoke English very well, introduced himself and explained the history of the castle and told us it was closed for renovations. “But have you seen the old bazaar and the 800-year-old mosque?” he asked. We said we had not and since it was close by he offered to take us there. Along the way we chatted and he learned things about us and told us things about himself.
We walked through a huge bazaar and into the old mosque. As we left the mosque I asked him where he worked and he said he had a carpet manufacturing and wholesale business that had been in his family for 70 years. “It is in the old caravanserai,” he said. “Would you like to see it?” It was the old Silk Road and the caravanserai that had attracted us to this part of Turkey so we readily agreed.
He led us into a very large old stone building, built in the 1500s. It was full of small businesses making or selling a wide range of products. He showed us the wool rooms where his company stored the wool provided to the 100 women throughout the region who wove carpets for them.
Then he took us into a dark interior room with a stone ceiling, stone walls and a stone floor so dingy he had to turn on the light. In one corner there was a small old cheap-looking desk and two large very old and beautiful rugs hung on one wall. There was a long couch and two coffee tables at the far end of the room and the other walls were hidden by huge mounds of carpets folded and piled on top of on another as high as a man could reach. Hanging prominently on a wall by the desk was a printed sign (in English):
‘It costs five times more to get a new customer than to keep the one you’ve got.’
It was so out of place that I commented on it. “It was something I read in a book,” said the man. “I had the sign made because that’s how my father, brother and I have run this business for 70 years. We travel all over Turkey selling our carpets to shops and stallkeepers and we aim to keep our customers for a long time. It’s not about today’s sale. It’s about the long-term.”
As I said earlier, Turks have learned that price is the last thing to talk about. Being price conscious tourists we always asked the price of things when we shopped. The answer was always: “The price doesn’t matter. Do you like it?” Then they would bring out similar items for us to look at – some looked cheaper, some more expensive. “Which of these do you like best?” they would ask.
Eventually, of course, price would be discussed but not before they had shown us a range of products and explained the value of each one.
These are three great lessons. Perhaps they explain why the Turkish economy has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world at a time when most countries, New Zealand included, have been struggling with minimal growth.

Dr Ian Brooks is a leading expert in customer care.
www.drianbrooks.blogspot.com.