- Home
- 1001 Ways to Wow Your Customers!
- What’s in a Name? Everything!
What’s in a Name? Everything!
- By Harvey Deutschendorf
- Published 09/6/2010
- 1001 Ways to Wow Your Customers!
-
Rating:
Harvey Deutschendorf
Harvey Deutschendorf is the author of The Other Kind Of Smart, Simple Ways to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence for Greater Personal Effectiveness and Success, published by American Management Association of New York May 2009. Harvey resides in Edmonton, Alberta.
Visit http://www.theotherkindofsmart.com/ for additional information.
One of the sweetest sounds to our ears is the sound of our own names. It is what makes us unique and individuals. Remember the popular TV series CHEERS, where the opening theme song went something like… ”It’s nice to come to a place where everyone knows your name” My nephew Brett was on his second job helping customers load their vehicles with merchandise that they purchased from a large home improvement center. He called his mother shortly after he started and told her that when he showed up for work coworkers at all levels would greet him by his first name. This was not the case in his first job, and it made a very positive impression on him. To him it meant that he was important part of the organization, part of the team.
Several years ago I regularly stopped at the same coffee shop on my way to work. It was like no other coffee shop that I have experienced before or since. The manager and all of the staff behind the counter knew all of the regular customer’s names. They always greeted us by our first names and carried on conversations with us during the time we were in the line up. This was no small feat, considering this was a very busy place and customer’s orders were coming in fast and steady. The manager had come up with a training program that emphasized intensive engagement with customers. She hired staff who were naturally friendly and outgoing. In most coffee shops the tip jars contain a few small coins. The tip jar in this place was always filled to the brim with large coins and bills.
I always cringe when someone tries to pronounce my last name. Unless they are familiar with Germanic languages they usually end up mangling it quite badly. A couple of years ago my provincial (Canadian version of a US State) representative was practicing pronouncing my last name in his office in preparation for his introducing me (I was sitting in the gallery) to the house and mentioning my book. He said my last name over until he got it perfect. To my dismay I watched as he got up in the house and totally mispronounced my last name. Maybe he was nervous (he was new to the job). Was I upset? Absolutely not! What made me more than willing to overlook this was knowing that he had made an honest effort to learn to say my name right.
On another instance the senior manager of our work units was introducing all of our unit staff at a company staff development retreat. He butchered my last name badly. For me that was unacceptable. It would have been easy for him to ask me how I pronounced my name. The fact that he hadn’t thought of it, or bothered to, was interpreted by me to mean that he couldn’t be bothered, that I didn’t matter enough for him to make the time and put in the effort.
With increasing diversity in the workplace it will take more time, patience and effort to learn the correct way to say people’s names that are in languages that are foreign to us. In my experience there is no better and easier way to begin to develop respect and trust of others than by taking the time and effort to learn to pronounce their names properly. I look at this as the basic foundations of any human resource strategy that seeks to motivate and engage their staff so that they perform at their maximum capacity. Without basic respect and trust in place, all other motivation attempts and strategies are not likely to have much impact.
Several years ago I regularly stopped at the same coffee shop on my way to work. It was like no other coffee shop that I have experienced before or since. The manager and all of the staff behind the counter knew all of the regular customer’s names. They always greeted us by our first names and carried on conversations with us during the time we were in the line up. This was no small feat, considering this was a very busy place and customer’s orders were coming in fast and steady. The manager had come up with a training program that emphasized intensive engagement with customers. She hired staff who were naturally friendly and outgoing. In most coffee shops the tip jars contain a few small coins. The tip jar in this place was always filled to the brim with large coins and bills.
I always cringe when someone tries to pronounce my last name. Unless they are familiar with Germanic languages they usually end up mangling it quite badly. A couple of years ago my provincial (Canadian version of a US State) representative was practicing pronouncing my last name in his office in preparation for his introducing me (I was sitting in the gallery) to the house and mentioning my book. He said my last name over until he got it perfect. To my dismay I watched as he got up in the house and totally mispronounced my last name. Maybe he was nervous (he was new to the job). Was I upset? Absolutely not! What made me more than willing to overlook this was knowing that he had made an honest effort to learn to say my name right.
On another instance the senior manager of our work units was introducing all of our unit staff at a company staff development retreat. He butchered my last name badly. For me that was unacceptable. It would have been easy for him to ask me how I pronounced my name. The fact that he hadn’t thought of it, or bothered to, was interpreted by me to mean that he couldn’t be bothered, that I didn’t matter enough for him to make the time and put in the effort.
With increasing diversity in the workplace it will take more time, patience and effort to learn the correct way to say people’s names that are in languages that are foreign to us. In my experience there is no better and easier way to begin to develop respect and trust of others than by taking the time and effort to learn to pronounce their names properly. I look at this as the basic foundations of any human resource strategy that seeks to motivate and engage their staff so that they perform at their maximum capacity. Without basic respect and trust in place, all other motivation attempts and strategies are not likely to have much impact.