Multiple Intelligences & Customer Service Understand Your Customers’ Needs ANDHow to Meet Them ALL!

How often have you experienced the following when you’ve called customer service or you’ve been at a so-called “customer service” desk in a store?
• the person behind the counter rarely looks you in the eye

• the customer service rep is so busy defending the company that he or she never really understands your issue, concern, or problem

• you reach a company’s “live” answering service which knows little or nothing about the company, it’s products, or services, but you’re assured “someone will call you back”

• you know more about the product you’ve purchased than the person with whom you’re talking

• when phoning customer service you’re put “on hold” for a long period of time and you’re forced to listen to a barrage of sales pitches or to a radio station

• you phone customer service and you only get through to a live person after making thirty-seven selections from an automated answering service

• the person with whom you’re talking sounds (or looks!) like they’re totally, unconditionally bored with their job

• you feel like you’re interrupting and bothering the customer service representative

• the customer service rep does most of the talking

• you leave feeling angry, frustrated, or in someway unsatisfied with your experience and you doubt you’ll do business with the company again

• you feel like you’re being talked down to

• the person behind the counter growls or scowls at youUnfortunately, this list could probably go on for quite a while, especially if you started adding your experiences!. The sad part about a list like this is that everyone of these negative experiences with customer service is preventable; yet in far too many situations they persist resulting in damage to the reputation of a company and its products and services.

In this article you will learn a Customer Service System that is based on the groundbreaking research on multiple intelligences – The 8 Kinds of Smart. A multiple intelligence approach to customer service creates an entirely different “customer experience” than those mentioned above.

Multiple intelligence asks us to look at ourselves and other people through a very different set of eyeglasses. When we deal with our customers from this perspective we suddenly have brand new ways to deeply connect with them, to understand their concerns, and to meet their needs.

What are some of the benefits of a multiple intelligence approach to customer service?
• When you can figure out out “where a customer is coming from” and how they process information, you can better meet their specific needs in ways that are tailored to them.

• The multiple intelligences give you multiple ways to more deeply and authentically connect with your customers, thus increasing the likelihood of a long-term relationship with them.

• When you know how to use a “multi-modal” approach to problem-solving you have many more options for truly helping a customer meet his or her needs, or addressing his or her concerns and issues.

• Your communication skills get turbo-charged because you have a wide variety of CustomerSmart™ Strategies for adjusting what you have to say to a customer based on their dominant intelligences.

• When you can pick up clues to a customer’s “intelligence profile” (which intelligences are stronger and more important to them) you can instantly adjust how you deal with them so you’re speaking to them at deeper levels.Designing the “Customer Experience”

The customer experience involves every single moment of contact a customer has with your company or organization from the very beginning, through the actual sale, to the contact with the company after the sale into the future.

Customer experience involves both the direct and indirect contacts and dealings with your company whether it be through a distributor of your products or services, a print ad, your website, FAQs you may have posted, forms which they fill out requesting further information, the experience of calling your 800 number, the “on hold” experience when this is necessary, the sound of the voice at the other end of the line, the first impressions they form in face-to-face customer service situations, what your body language communicates, and how your dress impacts them.

When you intentionally integrate The 8 Kinds of Smart into all of your dealings with customers, something almost magical happens. They open up to you in amazing ways because you are tapping into who they fundamentally are at deep levels of their being.

A multiple intelligences approach to customer service provides you with a screen and a set of tools for dramatically transforming each and every customer’s experience of your organization. The system presented in this article gives you some beginning tools to both find out what a customer needs and to fully address and met those needs, beyond all of their expectations.

Following you will find three samples of CustomerSmart™ Strategies from different intelligences. These demonstrate the power of integrating strategies such as these into your current customer service.

LogicSmart
Key characteristics of LogicSmart customers include being systematic and organized; they always having a rationale or argument for what they are thinking or doing; they love the challenge of a complex problem to solve; and the enjoy working with numbers, mathematical formulas, and spreadsheets.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with LogicSmart customers:

• How do we make sense to our customers?
• Do they understand our rationales and reasons?
Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Have them come up with what would make sense to them for resolving a complaint, problem, or issue.

• Look for ways to present information in charts, graphs, tables and, diagrams.

• Talk about your company, products, and services using statistics, percentages, data, case studies, and background research findings.ImageSmart
Key characteristics of ImageSmart customers include being aware of objects, shapes, colors, and textures; they are great at task which required visualization, pretending, and imagining; they express themselves through drawing or making visual diagrams.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with ImageSmart customers:

• What do my customers actually see?
• What do they see in their mind’s eyes
• What do they see in their imagination?
Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Always have something to show them, even though it might not seem necessary to you.

• If they’re having difficulty expressing something, ask them to get a picture in their head first then describe what they’re seeing, or ask them to draw you a picture of it.

• Ask your customers to visualize themselves using your products or solving a problem.BodySmart
Key characteristics of BodySmart customers include learning best through “hands on” activities and performance; they communicate well through body language, facial expressions, and physical gestures; they want to experience a product or service to see for themselves how it works.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with BodySmart customers:

• How do they feel about our company?
• What do they do with our product or service?
• How do they use it?

Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Have them dramatize, act out, or physically show you a problem or issue they are experiencing.

• Get them moving: “Let’s go for a walk and talk about this more so I can get a better feel for the situation.”

• Whenever possible, offer a demonstration or simulation of a solution you’re suggesting to their problem.
Each customer is unique. Each customer processes information in slightly different ways. They’ll express their concerns, issues, problems, and challenges in ways that are unique to their unique “intelligence profile”.

When you can recognize this and tap into their uniqueness, customer service becomes an experience of building long-term customer relationships, which go way beyond the present moment.

You CAN understand your customers’ needs and meet them ALL!