Customer interaction lessons from the Apple store

June 10th, 2011

Some rights reserved by nechbi

I stopped by the local Apple store recently to pick up a new laptop and was blown away by the way they manage client handoffs between their customer service representatives. It reminded me how poorly this is handled at so many salons and made me think we could learn some lessons from them.

Whenever it was time for me to be passed on to a different staff member they would introduce the two of us and explain what they were going to do to help me: “Stephen, this is John, he’s going to walk through the setup of your new computer with you.”  It made me more comfortable to communicate with the new representative and they knew a little bit more about me before we stated chatting.

I called up the apple store, but they said that their training program is confidential so I did a bit of digging around online and found a great article on Fast Company by Alex Frankel about working at the Apple store and how the training of Apple Store employees has been carefully designed.

Some of the key points they mention in the article are:

– Find people passionate about what they’re selling, this helps set the employee’s on-the-job attitude.

– Employees are trained to explain to customers that they had some questions to understand their needs, get permission to fire away, and then kept digging to ascertain which products would be best. Position, permission, probe.

– Employees are taught how to work together because customers will notice when employees don’t get along.

– Apple Store workers don’t seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. By making employees sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond.

– Lots of companies fail from the start by talking down to their new hires and using training materials geared for the lowest common denominator. Apple treats employees like adults.

– Every store provides regular training, which counts as work time. They also offer training to help staff move ahead as a Genius, Creative, or Manager — or to transition to one of those tracks from their current position.

Some rights reserved by Grant_Robertson

I’d recommend you stop by an Apple store yourself to see the result of their training program in action.  You might walk away with some ideas for your business.

Maybe it’s time to put a proper training program into place at your salon, your clients will love you for it!

stephen
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