4 soft skills for entrepreneurs looking to turn first-time visitors into regulars
With over 130 locations, the Color Me Mine franchise has become a beloved activity, enjoyed by generations. The business model is simple. Customers come in, choose a piece of pottery, paint it, leave it for the staff to glaze and fire it, and pick it up the next week.
Its enduring success isn’t just measured by the ceramics sold each week but by the hands of the dedicated staff that create them. The team is trained in both hard and soft skills. Hard skills are technical abilities, such as shaping ceramics on a pottery wheel, whereas soft skills are more interpersonal, like helping a customer think of a design.
Color Me Mine CEO and studio owner Teresa Johnson underscores the importance of soft skills in a profession where people come to your business to escape.
“This is not a transactional business. This is a relationship business where somebody walks in your studio, and they’re escaping whatever’s going on in their life. They’re bringing that baggage in. You get to learn about the people that come in who are in cancer treatments, people that come in who have lost recently. We’ve had lots of our customers in California [dealing with] devastating situations with the fires, and they’re looking for that place to come and get away.”
For over 30 years, Color Me Mine staff have been dedicated to the soft skills necessary to support every customer. One such customer Vannessa W. visited the Covina location with her friends in 2022 and still fondly looks back on her experience with the staff that day.
Read on to discover tips from Teresa and Vannessa on important soft skills for building customer loyalty that lasts generations.
1. Assess the level of support a customer might need
Teresa: “Having staff be able to assess and provide just the right of involvement, just the right of support when people need it [is important], and also to be able to know when that person needs a little bit of quiet time.
“In today’s environment, there are very few businesses that are going into creating relationships, and that’s fine. We need all of the businesses to thrive, but to know that we’re just one of those businesses that really is about the involvement and the relationship makes me happy because people come in for that reason—to see us—and we can fulfill the kinds of things they’re looking for.”
I think it’s really important for establishments to be able to assess the needs of their consumers… They don’t necessarily need to know what all those needs are, but just be attuned to the fact that people are different.
—Vannessa
2. Make customers feel seen and valued
Vannessa: “Whenever an employee, owner, staff member is very attuned to the needs of the customer, it elevates the customer experience. It’s not just me walking into an establishment and dealing with the task at hand on my own, but it’s really receiving guidance, almost like being held by the hand and being told, ‘This is what you’re going to do. This is how I can help you.’
“It just really helps give me a sense of comfort. Even though this is a new experience for me, I feel I can do it because there’s someone in my corner paying attention to what I’m doing, offering guidance as needed. It makes me feel like I’m a valued customer, not just another customer, even if I’m just one of many. I think it just really gives that special touch that makes the experience memorable.”
On the Yelp blog: 5 tips for making your customer’s day
3. Be open to receiving feedback in order to improve
Teresa: “Customer satisfaction is paramount to any small business. Everything else, in my opinion, takes care of itself… We have to run the best small business we can run.
“We have to care about our customers. We have to provide what they’re looking for. Then we have to ask them how we’re doing and we have to be ready for that feedback and to make changes as a result of that feedback. We want honest, real feedback. We’re not looking for anything sugarcoated. We want to know what kind of experience they had in our studios. That is going to form the direction that we go in for future developments, for future innovations.
It could be something as simple as ‘I didn’t like the music.’ That’s what we need to know. We are an experience-based business and we need to know if you had a great experience. And if not, why not? Obviously, everyone’s looking for 5-star reviews out in the world, but we want the truth. We need to get better as a result of it.
—Teresa
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4. Pass down your soft skills
Teresa: “One of my favorite things about being an operator of a paint room pottery studio is mentoring young people who are working there, some of which is their first job. That was so fulfilling for me because these young people would walk in at 16, 17, 18, some in college and hadn’t done or experienced certain things and certainly may not have ever had a customer service job. We spend a lot of time mentoring those folks, and it was so fulfilling to me as a human because if we impact people’s lives in a positive way, what else can you do in the world that’s better than that?
“It’s the same thing with customer service. When you get into customer service issues, how do you handle that? We’re all human. We’re all going to make mistakes. So how you deal with those mistakes really tells the story about your character and the culture that you want to create in your studio. We have a lot of opportunities on both sides of that, showing them how customer service works, how we want our customers treated, but also showing when we make a mistake, we take accountability and we fix it. We do the right thing at the end of the day.”
On the Yelp blog: Customer service training conquered in 3 easy steps
These lessons come from an episode of Behind the Review, Yelp & Entrepreneur Media’s weekly podcast. Listen below to hear from Teresa and Vannessa, or visit the show homepage to learn about the show and find more episodes.