When team members learn to truly care about customers and clients and establish a more authentic relationship with them, enterprises prosper. The formula of caring relationships and loyalty is well-known but hard to produce.
Getting team members to care is no easy task.
The key is to understand that caring, curiosity and genuine interest are siblings that can’t be separated. If you truly care, you want to know more about who the other person is, where they came from, what they experience, and how they see the world.
Teaching team members to care isn’t about asking them to be more curious or to take a genuine interest in customers and clients. They think they already do that, even when they don’t. Instead, good leaders ask for proof. And the proof is in what they know about specific customers and clients, not in what they are instructed to do.
To teach team members to care, good leaders ask them about specific clients and inquire about what they know about them. They ask for the customer’s backstory, where they came from, where they have lived, and how they grew up in the world. They ask about the passions and hobbies of specific customers, how they spend their time, and what excites them. They ask the team member to describe their strengths and weaknesses and how they learn.
When team members can’t answer these and other questions that reflect an understanding of specific customers and clients, the point is loudly made. You can’t say you care about customers without investing the time to know more about them.
Team members who are peppered with questions about their customers don’t even know that they are being taught. So they become less resistant to the lesson. They quickly learn what is expected of them when engaging customers and clients and they begin to explore. Once they become more inquisitive and curious, the end result is they also begin to care more. In fact, it is almost impossible to be curious without an elevated sense of caring.
The best team members act as if what they learn about others is important. The best leaders ask team members what they’ve learned to encourage them to invest in customers and clients. The more they learn and know, the more they come to care. It’s that straightforward.
