Starbucks Builds Customer Rapport through the “Good Sheet”

Certainly every best in company knows the importance of building rapport with every customer they interact with. What is rapport? The definition of rapport:

Rapport is a customer’s perception of having an enjoyable interaction with a service provider, characterized by a personal connection between the two parties.

So how can a company establish a strong rapport with its customers? In addition to creating a warm and personalized greeting, there are a number of things that a company can teach employees to enable them to establish a good rapport with their customers.

• Establish Common Ground. It has been proven that people tend to relate to other people who are most like themselves. They want to feel a connection to the person they are interacting with. Employees can search for common ground with their customers by finding something they have in common – perhaps children of the same age, or a fondness of travel. Establishing common ground is the first step to building rapport, as it helps someone see you as a person that is “just like them”.
• Encourage each customer to talk about themselves and their accomplishments. A company should never forget that the customers they are interacting with are one hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your issues. So train your employees to encourage their customers to talk about themselves!
• Keep a positive attitude. When you’re employees are positive and upbeat, your customers will naturally want to be around them and do business with you. Unfortunately, in today’s world, seeds of negativity are all around us – a company can stand out by having employees with a positive attitude.
• Show respect. In order to build rapport with customers, employees must understand the importance of respecting every customer and their time and energy.
• Start a conversation of mutual interest with your customers. Interesting, Starbucks certainly understands the importance of creating conversations with their customers. On Thursday, Starbucks will begin offering a free paper from the magazine Good in its stores. Called the Good Sheet, each week it will tackle one election topic, like carbon emissions, health care or education. And Starbucks hopes it will get people talking. The magazine will provide fact sheets on different subjects to the coffee chain. “We had been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment,” said Terry Davenport, the senior vice president for marketing at Starbucks.“We thought, boy, if we could distribute some of those in the stores, it’s a quick way — without sitting down and reading a five-page article — a quick way to join the conversation,” Mr. Davenport said, adding that he envisioned stores holding discussion nights.

Interesting news – maybe Starbucks knows more about building rapport with its customers than we thought!

What do you think?