Most of us are products of cultural confusion and cultural clashes. I went to a high school that had kids from just about every background imaginable. But because we laughed at each other’s cultural faux pas and helped each other deal with all the confusion around us, we developed good bonds with each other and learned to enjoy all the differences.
Most businesses, however, are not equipped to deal with the many different cultures we run into on a day-to-day basis. Every day we run into a cultural confusion or a cultural clash that often ends up in misunderstandings or hard feelings.
How do you instill a culture of appreciating other cultures in a business? First there has to be a clear business reason to pursue such a course. That reason is to get more referrals. Referral business is the best kind of new business to get for so many reasons.
When you do a good job navigating the cultural clashes and confusion, you receive a much higher number of referrals. Everyone can justify pursuing a goal that lowers the cost of new customer acquisition, adds to the lifetime customer value proposition and eases the customer on-boarding process.
The basic mindset for this exercise is simple. No matter how different we are from someone else, we all want the same basic things:
- To save time and money.
- To be understood.
- To feel respected.
- To deal with people who are not idiots.
How do we get across to people that you are not an idiot, that you are respecting them, understanding them and helping them to save time and money? Show someone that you “get” one simple little thing about them.
You will make mistakes and have clashes and confusion. Here is how you handle these situations:
- Assume you are at fault.
- Apologize for the error.
- Use humor to move on.
- Try again to find a cultural connection.
Customers appreciate it when you take responsibility for the problem. Sometimes it is hard for our telephone reps to understand callers for whom English is not a first language. Rather than telling a caller “What? I didn’t understand you. Please repeat that”, we try to say “I am sorry. I lost focus on you for a moment. Could you please repeat that?” A simple adjustment in language often makes a big difference in how the rest of the call unfolds.
Like everything else it takes a lot of well-organized effort to make it work. But once you start to make progress, you will see your referral business grow and you will see your front-line customer-facing employees become happier.
So get to work. Wouldn’t you like to be in the position where cultural clashes and confusion are good things because they turn into great sales and service interactions?
