When dealing with customers, it’s not always for a great reason. Sometimes it’s because you did something wrong, something isn’t working, or something just isn’t right. That might seem like a strange time to be humorous, but if you add humor when dealing with customers you’ll soon do better at connecting with them and smoothing over issues. A little humor can go a long way when things aren’t going right otherwise.
* Understand Your Customer’s Sense of Humor – The most important aspect to understand when using humor to deal with customers is that you need to know who each customer is and their sense of humor. Who your audience is has a big effect on what type of humor you choose to use so that you make them happy rather than offend them.
* Let Them Start – Often, it’s a good idea to first let your customer do the talking. Even if it’s not a problem, they like to talk. Let them talk about their issue while you listen. If it helps, take notes. When you think it’s appropriate, especially if they laugh at themselves, go ahead and insert some humor into the situation while you solve their problem.
* Do You Have a Relationship? – You should work to build relationships with your customers over time. You should be emailing them, connecting on social media, going to events where they go and so forth. The more you build that relationship, the more they’ll understand your sense of humor as well.
* Be Appropriate – Many things might be funny, but they may not be appropriate for your customers. Even comedians find themselves in hot water when they go too far with their humor. But as a non-comedian, you’ll need to be even more careful to remain workplace appropriate with your customers.
* Keep It Timely – The humor you use will go over better if it’s timely. This means that it’s related to whatever you’re talking about right now with your customer. For example, if you can relate the issue with something else happening right now, it’ll be even funnier. If you relate it to something from the distant past, your customer likely will not get the joke.
* Be Tasteful – Customer service is not the time to tell blue jokes. Keep everything clean, and drop any reference to race, religion, or sex. You don’t want to be making jokes about women drivers to either a man or a woman, even if you’re talking to them about their insurance claim because a woman rear-ended them.
* Know Your First Reason for Being – It’s imperative that as a business owner you know your why. Why are you here? Who are you here for? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the point? If any humor you inject into the situation fits into your voice and your why, you’re going to be more successful.
* Have Fun – It’s important that you don’t force humor. You want to have fun with humor. If it doesn’t work out, take notes, and try to improve next time. You need to be able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes too.
* Tell an Attention-Grabbing Story – When trying to explain concepts to customers, it can help to tell a story to them that is funny about someone else. If it’s not downgrading, but is truly funny, it can help teach the customer something new and help satisfy them and solve their problem.
* Push Boundaries – Humor isn’t without risk. You’ll need to push boundaries to get the humor inserted in most business instances. But again, don’t go so far that you bring in race, religion, sex or politics. Those aren’t the boundaries you should push in business unless you’re in the business of being a comedian.
Using humor when dealing with customers is a good way to take away the stress involved. Often, you’re talking to the customer due to a problem or mistake. If you can take that problem, turn it into something funny, and fix the issue quickly, you’re going to be a winner in their book.
