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Strong Systems to Greet Customers: Celebrate 10-4 Day with ZingTrain
The 10-4 tool is when employees acknowledge customers with eye contact and a smile when they are within 10 feet and verbally greet them when they are within 4 feet, creating a welcoming environment. 10-4 Day is an opportunity to celebrate this effective customer service tool and have some fun! Learn about how Zingerman’s Community of Businesses embraces the 10-4 Rule for customer service along with more effective customer service approaches in ZingTrain’s Art of Giving Great Service seminar and workshop.
The article below was originally published in Lawn & Garden Retailer in 2017, as a collaboration between former ZingTrain Community Builder, Gauri Thergaonkar, and myself (Elnian Gilbert). I vividly remember sitting at a table in our lobby area, discussing all of the fine points of the 10-4 Rule – what would be the most useful to our audience and hotly debating what to include (and ultimately leave out, though it was a hard call to keep anything back!) We had a lot of fun writing it, and I’m proud of what we created together. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve shared this article with folks in training, and now we’re sharing it with you!
At ZingTrain, we collectively had a belated glimpse of the obvious, that 10-4 is not only a valuable tool we use and teach in all customer service training – it’s a date on the calendar! Our hope is that whether you’re already using 10-4 in your organization or are enthusiastic about getting started, you’ll celebrate 10-4 Day with us on October 4 this year and every year.
At Zingerman’s we’re big fans of clear expectations and simple, teachable trackable tools. We find that they are invaluable no matter who we share them with — tenured employees, newbies, skeptics, enthusiasts, introverts, extroverts. If we give our staff clear performance expectations and simple tools with which to meet those expectations, everyone wins. Including the business!
Perhaps our favorite amongst these tools is the 10-4 Rule. It’s a powerful customer service tool. It’s easy to implement; it’s effective whether you’re in your peak season or in the doldrums, and it’s useful whether you’re trying to boost sales or boost your customer service. Clients who have come to our Art of Giving Great Service Seminar often make it the very first customer service change they implement. Here it is.
The 10-4 Rule
Any time we’re within 10 feet of someone we make solid eye contact and smile, and when we’re within 4 feet, we greet them verbally.
The Details
10-4 applies on the way in. When anyone comes within 10 feet of us, we make eye contact and smile; at 4 feet, we verbally greet them with anything from a simple “Hello!” to a friendly, “What brought you in today?” When used well, the 10-4 Rule helps create a positive welcoming environment, the kind of space where the best people want to work, shop or be!
10-4 applies on the way out. This aspect is easy to forget — even when you have a ton of experience in customer service. If we make eye contact and acknowledge folks as they are leaving, they leave feeling like we care about them. And if we don’t, we might miss our last chance to learn from their experience. Over the years, we’ve had hundreds of “moments of truth” simply because a staff member was able to identify a problem and take last-minute action before we lost that customer for life.
10-4 goes through glass. This means that that customer who is standing outside, waiting for you to unlock the door, appreciates eye contact, a smile and the acknowledgment that you know they are there. And if you look outside and make eye contact and smile at someone walking by? You might just lure them inside!
10-4 has no limits. We’re pretty certain there is no quota that applies to happy, heartfelt greetings! This might seem counterintuitive — if your colleague is working with a customer, will you be stepping on their toes if you end up in a conversation with their customer? Perhaps it’s best to avoid eye-contact entirely? As you already know, we disagree! Well-meaning as our intentions might be when we avoid eye contact, we end up making someone feel invisible and miss valuable connections. It’s a much more welcoming place when everyone is making eye contact and offering a friendly “hello!” Sure, it adds up to a lot of greetings, but it’s the polite — and profitable — thing to do.
Let’s take it a step further. What if you’re an accountant and on the sales floor to do a product count? Or a manager on your way to a meeting? Or on your lunch break? What if you just don’t have time or are not sure that you will be able to answer the customer’s questions? Then engaging a customer hardly feels like good service, right? We’d like to suggest that it is! When we use 10-4 anyway, customers know we care about what they need — and they’ll get the answer, whether it’s from you or a coworker.
10-4 has no limits, Part 2: If your stores have walls and corners, as ours do, you might not be able to see customers all the time. If your stores need stocking and prep, as ours do, your primary focus at any given moment might be a task, rather than a customer. We’d like to suggest that the 10-4 Rule still applies. In fact, we’d like to suggest that you actively keep a 360-degree perspective. Banish those blind spots. Take off the blinders. Do your side work in places where customers can easily see you and you can easily see them. Go seeking as many customers as you can to subject to your cheery 10-4.
10-4 works with more than just your co-workers. Your paying customers certainly appreciate 10-4, and so will your coworkers, your vendors, the person who delivers your lunch, your mail carrier, and the list goes on. Using 10-4 lavishly makes a huge difference to the overall energy of a business, and sets a positive engaged tone for the customer. It creates great relationships to boot!
4 Reasons We Love the 10-4 Rule
It’s clear. It’s simple. It’s easy to teach. And it’s easy to remember and reinforce. While using the 10-4 Rule may come naturally to some extroverted folks, for people who are more shy or introverted, it’s an incredibly powerful, behavioral tool that sets them up for success, every time.
It sets the tone. It sets the tone for our customers. And it sets the tone for our employees and clearly communicates to them what kind of business we want to be. We teach the rule to every employee. It’s a behavioral performance expectation and we reinforce it as often as we need to.
It helps us avoid the unintentional blind spot. You know that horrible situation where everyone assumes that someone else is taking care of a customer, but in truth no one is? Using the 10-4 Rule radically drops the chances that this occurs.
And finally, the biggest reason we like the 10-4 Rule so much? Because it works!
We hope that when you read this, you will be inspired to implement the 10-4 Rule. You can start using it yourself almost instantaneously. We just about guarantee immediate positive results — in fact, pause right now and give it a whirl!
We do hope, however, that you will also choose to implement it at the business level. After all, it’s elegantly simple, eminently teachable and entirely free! And when you do, we have 3 requests :
- You can download a fun (and free!) printable poster of the 10-4 Rule here.
- If you get stuck, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We’ve done this across our 11 businesses and for hundreds of clients, and we can help you implement it, too.
- Help us celebrate 10-4 Day internationally on October 4!
Celebrate 10-4 as an individual
- Make eye contact with all and sundry.
- Greet every single person who gets within 4 feet of you.
- Think about how you could apply 10-4 over the phone, in email, and in the virtual world!
Celebrate 10-4 as an organization
- Teach 10-4 to your team!
- Model great 10-4 leading up to October 4th, and see if you can spot a difference in how others react to you and your business.
- Spend October 4th using the 10-4 Rule with everyone you come into contact with, and encourage as many people as you can to do the same!
Celebrate 10-4 with ZingTrain!
- Share videos of 10-4 in action in your business.
- Post pictures of 10-4 on social media and be sure to tag it with #104Rule and #zingtrain.
- Tell us how you’ve adapted 10-4 to work in your setting – do you use 4-1 or 30-10 instead?
