Good for

Team meetings, customer service training, refresher and review sessions.

This exercise works well where people work face to face with customers

Length

Can vary depending on the time you have available, the size of group, and whether you do this in full group or in pairs.

Suggested running time 15 - 30 minutes.

You will need

• post it notes
• pens
• flipchart
• flipchart pens
  

Instructions

Making a good impression with customers is essential. This is a useful exercise to demonstrate to the group the importance of creating a good impression.

Give each participant a post-it note.

Ask them to write down the one person they would like to meet. It might be a film star, a singer, a sportsperson, anyone that they would really like to meet.

Ask them to imagine that they have won a competition to meet and interview that person this afternoon for a local TV station.

• what would they do?
• what would they wear?
• how would they feel?

Lead the discussion to get them to recognise they would make an effort with their appearance and their behaviour because they wanted to impress the person.

Relate this to making a good impression on your customers.

Lead a discussion, and capture their answers on the flipchart. If you have enough time, and enough participants, split them down into groups, and give each a sheet of flipchart paper, and ask the group to agree the standards for making a good impression on customers.

To give the exercise some structure, you might want them to focus on

• appearance
• body language
• greeting
• answering a query / helping the customer
• housekeeping and tidiness
  

You can extend the training activity good impressions by linking it to the training activity below

Six degrees of separation

A good way to make the link to customer care is to play six degrees of separation.

If you are unfamiliar with this concept, it simply demonstrates that it is a small world.

It's the concept, that everyone can trace a link to anyone through six people.   The friend of a friend......

Try it with your friends, its fun and amazing.  

So for example let's say you're thinking of Brad Pitt. I know someone who works for a company that supplies a production company with film, so we can find a route to get to him.

Get the idea?

Make the point that every customer counts, you never know who they are, and who they know.

Six degrees of separation and social media

Recent studies show that social media makes the degrees of separation even smaller.

Facebook and the University of Milan reported not 6 but 4.74, and in other studies, Twitter showed 4.67 steps and LinkedIn just 3.

Ask the group what that means for them and customer service in the age of social media.