New Year's Resolution: Eliminate THIS PHRASE From Your Vocabulary!

(This is a guest post by Rick DeLisi of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

New Year's observation: If there's anything longer than the line at the bar/buffet line/dessert table in December…it's the line at the gym/health club/Weight Watchers' meeting in January.

'Tis the season to resolve.

If your quest for the new year is to drop a few holiday-induced L-B-S's…the best advice I've ever heard is, "Write down everything you eat during the course of the day."  Turns out that simply training your brain to become hyper-aware of how many unnecessary calories we each consume every day is the "trigger" to kick-start a whole new mental process, that ultimately makes you eat less, and lose weight.  (BTW, 45 minutes a day on the treadmill ain't gonna kill ya either, pal!)

But if your resolution for 2012 is to create an even greater customer experience at your company, here's a small piece of friendly advice that will similarly trigger a new mental process for you and your entire team. It's a matter of eliminating one simple phrase from your everyday vocabulary.  It's not a phrase that sounds harmful at any level (in fact, when you use it, you probably think you're doing something positive). But if you stop using it (although it'll be hard at first), many amazing things will happen.

Stop saying, "the customer."  

I mean, we say that all the time.  We ALL do.  We all talk about how important it is to listen to the customer. To treat the customer with respect. To reduce the effort the customer has to put forth to resolve their issue.

But here's where we need to re-wire our brains. 'Cause there's no such thing as THE customer.

Your company has thousands of customers. Or millions. And they are each very different. They have different interests, experience levels, language issues, expectations. And the more we allow ourselves to think about them as if they are one thing, one amorphous mass, one chain-gang of humanity…the further we get from creating the kind of customer experience that defines excellence in today's world:

A tailored, customized interaction that meets the specific needs of that one person, and their issue(s).

So, we need to stop thinking about thousands of different people (our customers) as one thing (THE customer) and start thinking of them as individuals who are as different from each other as — let's say — your grandmother…and that weird dude with the gigantic gauged earlobes who works at the music store.

Now, the fact that you have thousands of different people as customers doesn't mean you need to create thousands of different sales and service experiences. But certainly "one size fits all" isn't the right approach either.

I saw a great sign during this past year in the break room at the Houston-based call center of Southwest Airlines.  It reads simply…

Behind every customer, is a person.

Here's wishing that 2012 is the year you and your company refocus on the people you serve, instead of just THE customer.

SEC Members, for more on tailoring, review our best practice on how Solae LLC created 'cheat sheets' to help reps tailor pitches to individual stakeholders and be sure to check out our new training module on Tailoring for Resonance, which teaches reps tailoring techniques.

How about you? What are you resolving to do differently in 2012?