What is important in customer service
I usually talk to customers who come to the store, explaining everything they want to know about the product, including its quality, how it feels to use, and aftercare, so that they will want it and be convinced to buy it.
Each customer has different things they want to know, things they are concerned about, and points they consider important.
I believe that even if I tell customers everything I know and can say, it won't resonate with them.
During our conversations, I try to ascertain what is important to the customer and what concerns them, and then I think to myself, "This is what they value, so I'll go into more detail about this part!"
If someone talks to you about a lot of uninteresting things, your brain won't remember what they're saying.
This applies not only to customer service, but also to everyday conversations.
In particular, I have an extremely low level of interest in things that don't interest me (which is not a good thing at all, and I am aware that it's actually not good), so I don't like people who talk endlessly about things that I'm not interested in.
Of course, I really like it when people talk in a way that piques interest in things that I've never been interested in before.
Even in everyday conversations, I tend to just brush aside things that I'm not interested in or that I've decided I don't care about. So, if you're visiting an interior design shop thinking you might want to look for some furniture and the staff member talking about something you're not interested in is something you've never heard of before, I think it would be painful.
Of course, I have had similar experiences at the store.
When I come across a shop that I feel is a good fit for me, I continue to go back. Clothes, miscellaneous goods, sometimes furniture, beauty salons, restaurants... I've been thinking a lot lately that it's really difficult for people to meet each other.
That's why we want to cherish the encounters and environments with people we get along with.
Encountering something new
In terms of encounters, something new started in 2020.
That is the online shop.
As I mentioned earlier, up until now, the process has been to meet someone, have them in front of you, and pick up hints from the conversation to talk to them, but with an online shop, you don't have customers in front of you.
I don't know what kind of people are watching.
However, one thing that is common when talking to customers in front of me is that they will not read if I keep talking about things that they are not interested in. This is something that I realized is really difficult when I started the online shop.
First of all, I had to think about what kind of customers I wanted to interest and what kind of information those customers would like to have, and although I have written many different sentences up until now, this was the most difficult.
What I'm talking about now is something that IT Company has told me I can write about freely on my blog (maybe not, lol), so I'm just putting down exactly what I want to say.
You might say that I had no such intention, but I see this blog as an opportunity for me to reexamine myself.
I personally believe that the transcriptions I do here will become a valuable asset to me.
I am truly grateful to be able to write such a humble piece of writing. Thank you.
The difficulty of conveying things in writing
Returning to the point, in an online shop, you need to convey the message in writing so that the customer likes it and clicks to purchase it on the online shop.
Since we cannot ask our customers how they are doing, we carefully write down what we think they would like to know in an easy-to-understand manner, and also convey our thoughts on why we selected the products we have, and we repeat this process over and over again.
Up until now, things that have been conveyed through conversation have been difficult to put into words, and I learned the difficulty of how to communicate. And by repeating this experience, it also gave me an opportunity to think deeply about our store.
By reviewing what our store aims to achieve, what we want to communicate, our policies, catchphrases, etc., it also gave us an opportunity to reconsider our product selection.
It's still difficult to put our thoughts into words and deliver them to the customers we envision, but we'll keep working hard every day to capture their hearts!
When something new starts, it gives us a chance to stop and rethink what has been going on in the usual way up until now, and it gives us the excitement of knowing that another interesting thing has begun. Writing this blog has made me realise once again that this repetition is what makes work so interesting.
And I also hope that the environment where we can meet and talk in person will return soon.
(text: Shimazaki)
SHIMAZAKI AYAKO
I loved redecorating and constantly rearranging my room as a child, and before I knew it, 12 years have passed since I started working in interior design. I am the manager of two different interior design shops, and I've recently started working in the e-commerce business. I'm a bundle of curiosity, and although I have a high level of concentration, my persistence is quite low, so I'm secretly worried about writing a blog.