In order to satisfy your customers, you must know what they want. Learning what your customers want doesn't just happen. When you watch the most successful veterinarians work, they have a method from which they are constantly learning about their customers. With individual customers, it is important to address them using their name. In order to learn about someone, it is important to first develop trust, because without trust, people are not willing to share details about themselves, including identifying their needs to you. Nothing builds trust like remembering someone's name and addressing them by name, even in your first meeting. Always repeat your customer's name when you meet them and make sure to commit their name to memory. There are several very successful techniques for remembering names. "I'm not good at names is not a good or acceptable solution." Practice these techniques in everyday situations such as with your waiter or waitress, the hotel clerk or concierge, and others you interact with on a daily basis. You will see a dramatic improvement in the level of service you receive by doing so! Imagine the feeling on subsequent visits when you greet someone by their name, or when you see them on the street, and still you greet them using their name. A good book on this topic that I recommend to people at all levels from students to executives is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
On a larger scale, knowing what your customers want requires asking them in a different way. Use surveys to get direct feedback on key customer needs and preferences. You can quickly capture feedback from a significant portion of your customers very quickly using Surveymonkey or something similar. Your customers are typically very anxious and grateful that you've asked them for input, and that you care what they think. Properly constructed surveys can help guide you in developing and delivering the services your customers want. If you want assistance in developing and implementing a customer survey, contact us at any time for a proposal. Customer feedback can then be used as education for your team. In this way, you can use the voice of the customer to help implement changes and improvements, rather than you just telling your team what they should do. Often, your team will 'hear' the customer and act more quickly from their input to a well-designed survey.
Lastly, knowing your customers requires you to have effective data-mining capabilities to identify trends and needs of individual customers and groups of customers so that you can provide appropriate education and awareness targeted at a specific group of people to whom the issue is relevant. This is a very important and powerful component of knowing what your customer wants. Too few practices use these techniques and tools effectively to 'know what their customers want'.
