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December 1999 For Your Staff: Customer Relations Connecting with Clients Personal contact will give you an edge that electronic sales can't erase In the age of Internet sales and home shopping programs, try not to forget one basic tenet: people buy from people, says Luisa Graff of Luisa Graff Jewelers, Colorado Springs, CO. Technology can take people away from interacting with each other just at the time they most crave interaction with another person. Graff demonstrated the effectiveness of personal interaction by meeting and greeting each person who entered a seminar she presented at Professional Jeweler's PrimeTime Fall Marketplace & Conference in Las Vegas. Immediately, attendees began to speak with her as a peer and more quickly took her message to heart. "I'm here to tell you obvious things," she said. "But you may not realize they are obvious – or your employees may not." A survivor of a military coup in Peru, Graff learned how to empathize with people to survive, she told the audience. Jewelers need to do the same to survive in business, she said. "Find the needs of your customer and put him or her at ease," she said. "See life through the eyes of the customer, and you will have a client for a long time. "When I first began selling jewelry, I was told I spend too much time with customers," she said. Twenty years later, she still sells to those same customers, though now they buy higher-ticket jewelry. In other words, talking with customers is critical. You should find out what motivates the customer in order to "match" his or her needs with what you sell and how you sell it. Obvious vs. Subliminal Here are Graff's suggestions for successful communication:
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