Connected Yet Disconnected in Sales Today

Connected Yet Disconnected in Sales Today

We are all intensely connected at high speed for information, yet dramatically disconnected in true human interaction.

I can go back very far in my sales career to when I was just 17 years old and worked for a store called, Palais Royal at our local mall. We used what were called, "clientel books" and we'd keep track of our customers and what they liked and bought. We would send personalized note cards, call them when items they wanted would come into the store. When our customers walked in the door, we knew them by name and would open our books to refresh our memories of what their favorite brands were or particularly favorite items they usually bought.

My mother and I were talking this evening about one of her favorite businesses, called Curves. She loves to go there and "work-out" and she loves the business itself. She likes how they call her to remind her, or call her to thank her. They send personalized notes to her in the mail, and when she walks in the door they are friendly and very customer oriented. After the hurricane in Galveston, this business was wiped out. All their client base was gone, their store had to have everything replaced down to all the exercise equipment. They took the time and made the special effort to call each former client on the phone and personally invite them back for business. This kind of thing made an impression on my mother.
I sometimes affectionately refer to her as the "average typical consumer" because she is a good monitor to me of what the general public will like, do, appreciate and notice.

That brings me to what happened earlier today.

I had accidentally deleted my account on activerain so I sent an email to someone I saw was the community manager, Brad. I thought maybe he could help me figure out what I did to make that happen...all my friends know I "accidentally delete" a lot. haha. To my amazement, he took the time to actually call me on the phone and work with my account step by step to figure out why it happened, then he also took the time to give me pointers and tips and advice on things that will really benefit me in using the site, and also my own website. I thought that extra effort of personalizing that interchange ties in very nicely to what my mother later mentioned this evening.

In this day and age..everything is anonymous. It's disconnected. Everything is fast, very fast. Everything is also so impersonal that we aren't "vested" in things like we should be. Just like banking online, mortgage online, buying a car on ebay, anything we do now online...it's not personalized, it's detached.

I think going back to real customer service will make a come back. People will crave that salesperson that knows them in a department store. They will crave being able to call up a business and have someone answer the phone. People will also crave appreciation and the feeling of being valued as a customer. They want to be thanked for using a business.

In my opinion we should continue to utilize technology in sales to capture leads, to share valuable information, to advertise...but once those leads are captured, we need to go back to old-fashioned customer service.

I plan to keep this philosophy in my work in Galveston Real Estate.

It will make all the difference.