Have you ever been in a conversation with one of your office staff or technicians and asked or been asked, “If you could just…?” or “It’s just…”. I believe we all have or many still do phrase communication this way. I believe, if we were aware of the true indication of that word, we would do our best to just remove it. Just, has several meanings, but when used in this way it simply means…the task or solution is simple. It’s a way of communicating that the particular thing you’re asking for is not a difficult task and requires little.
Here’s an example:
When a customer is constantly patronizing you with, “Can you fix it?” or “How much is this going to cost me?”As a service tech, we sometimes try and ease the customers pain by simply dropping a quick line like, “Don’t worry, it’s probably just the …….”. The important part here is that before this moment, the customer had a perceived cost in mind as to how much they were wanting to spend in order to get this taken care of. For argument sake, let’s call that $300. At the moment you used the word just in the above phrase what do you suppose happened to that perceived cost? Exactly! It went down by not just a little, it went down by A LOT!!!! And, we find in general, that with everyday service work, the actual cost is as much as 10x the perceived cost. Causing a very angry customer when you finally give them the price. They are expecting to pay $30-$50 and you may give them a price of $150-$300. Which by the way would have made them very happy originally. But since you used the word “just”, we now have a problem.
So in short, what’s the goal?
It took you years and years to begin using the word just as much as you do now. So, actively start weeding it out of your daily conversations as soon as possible!
Thanks for reading and as always.
TO YOUR SUCCESS!
Matt Koop / Vice President/ The New Flat Rate
