I heard a new expression this week. A smeye. It means a smile with your eyes. Something you can still do when you are wearing a mask.
New to me. Apparently it’s old and originally came from Tara Banks as something to do on the runway. This week I heard it from a different source, a member in my community choir. Resurrected and reframed for right now.
Our community choir is meeting virtually these days. Chatting via zoom.
We recently did a video version of Coldplay’s Fix You. We individually taped ourselves. Our choir master Alex mixed the 60+ tracks together into what I’m proud to say is one of the best choir videos of the pandemic. But I’m biased.
Anyway… back to the smeye.
On our zoom call this week, one person said next time we do a video compilation that she will smile more. I said I find it hard to smile and sing at the same time, even though my regular choir master Melissa always says it actually improves your voice. Making it lighter and brighter. Alex said remember all smiles actually start with the eyes and to think of something that makes you smile. And someone piped in about a smeye.
Reflecting on it later, the whole thing also hankered back to old recommendations for phone support people. To use a mirror when talking to customers on the phone, to make sure you are maintaining positive body language and a smile. Because people can hear a smile. And worse they can hear the absence of one. Funnily enough, it really works.
And I thought, where else is this possible? What other ways do we communicate with our customers where if we did it with a smile it would change the interaction for the better? A social post? Our onboarding emails? Sales calls? This newsletter? Now that we are living more and more in a virtual world and seeing people less and less, remembering to still smile goes a long way.
Speaking of these customer touchpoints….
In this week’s blog post I reflect on two ways we look at tracking our engagements with customers. Revenue funnels and customer journey mapping. They are different perspectives of the same thing. One is our gated internal process. One is the view from the customer’s perspective. Insight about our customers can come from using both of these.
>>> To hear more about it, head over here to read this latest post.
What do you think? Does this resonate with you?