Limit Terms in Customers’ Vocabulary

Require your customers to talk right. If they don’t, shame them into compliance. That’s the advice restaurant owner The Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” Episode 116 would have given if he went into management consulting. Dare to insist on the free bread everybody else is getting with their soup, and the rest of the customers will witness you being refused service.
     Fortunately, we don’t need The Soup Nazi. Anne Morriss, managing director of Concire Leadership Institute, gives a variant of the same advice. The centerpiece of her argument is Starbucks, where long waiting lines resulted from customers using a broad variety of terms to order their beverages. Ms. Morriss explains the motivation for compliance when one’s language is corrected publicly. Request, quite precisely, a 20-ounce beverage size and the barista yells out, “Venti.”
     As a general rule, I recommend against shaming customers. Still, there’s a good argument for limiting the terms shoppers use by training them with what consumer researchers call a “consumption vocabulary.”
     Say you operate a wine shop. A customer you don’t recall having seen before inquires if you carry a wine he had recently tried at a restaurant and truly enjoyed. The trouble is he can’t remember the name of the wine. You ask him to describe what it tasted like. Your thought is that if you don’t carry that particular wine, you can find something with parallel characteristics.
     The man shakes his head. “I’ll know it when I taste it.”
     You can’t open every bottle. If only this shopper had a vocabulary to describe wine tastes. Dry. Sweet. Smooth. Pungent. Big. With such a vocabulary, you might not need to turn your question from “Can you describe the wine?” into “Can you describe the wine bottle label?”
     A proper consumption vocabulary speeds up the purchase of the item, and the faster you can take care of each customer, the more rapidly the profits can flow in.
    Actually, shoppers with consumption vocabularies don’t spend less time in the store on average. They spend more time and they end up buying more items than the customer who lacks the vocabulary. This is because the vocabulary allows the shopper to appreciate the differences among products. To someone without the words, the brain’s more likely to say it all tastes the same.
     Refining the vocabulary makes the shopping experience richer.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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