7 Reasons Why Personality Matters In Customer Service

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Nate Regier / 0 comments
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First, let’s get clear about what personality is, and isn’t.

Personality isn’t temperament. Temperament is an enduring preference for how you engage with the world. Personality includes a lot more about who you are, how you are built, and what makes you tick.

Personality is more than a style, a preference, a color, a quadrant or an animal. Personality can’t be put in a box or conveniently labeled. People are much more complicated than that.

Personality is all of these things

  • Perceptual filters: How you take in and process the world around you.
  • Communication preferences: How you like to exchange with others.
  • Environmental preferences: How you prefer to interact with the world around you.
  • Motivational Needs: How you are motivated and what fills your tank.
  • Character Strengths: Your natural capabilities, those things you love to do and come more easily.
  • Distress behaviors: How we go about getting negative attention when our motivational needs aren’t met positively.
  • Emotional triggers: Emotional issues that are more difficult for us to deal with authentically. Those things we would prefer to avoid or make disappear. They keep us up at night.

Why Personality Matters In Customer Service:

  1. Customers “hear” your message more clearly when it’s delivered through their favorite perceptual filter. How you say something is often more important than what you say.
  2. Customers are more involved, compliant, and engage when you use their favorite communication style. Miscommunication invites mistrust and disengagement.
  3. Meeting customers “where they are at” means attending to their favorite environmental preference.
  4. Customers are far more engaged when they can leverage their character strengths. If interactions with you are too hard or uncomfortable for them, they will seek someone else who will make it easier.
  5. Customers buy and use your stuff if it fills their tank. Appealing to motivational needs is a HUGE WIIFM.
  6. When customers are in distress, they become suspicious, unreasonable, noncompliant, “hard of hearing,” adversarial, over controlling, avoidant, and overly sensitive. Do you want that? If not, meet their motivational needs proactively and positively. Because if you don’t you’ll be putting out fires and chasing dead-ends all day.
  7. If you’re into finding and addressing pain points, then the emotional trigger is your holy grail. When you can provide a product and relationship that soothes the emotional trigger, you’ve got their attention.  If you can help the customer deal more effectively with that trigger, you’ve differentiated yourself far above the competition.

If you’re using a personality model but it isn’t giving you the customer intelligence to address these challenges, maybe it’s time to upgrade. You can do all of this with the Process Communication Model. We’ll teach you how.

Want to learn how to improve your approach with customer service improvement strategies? Read my blog to find out how!


Personality Matters in Sales and Patient Care as well.


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