How do you personally build rapport with staff members, clients or customers? What techniques or skills do you utilize the most for this contact?

Understand the needs of each and commuicate with him/her effectively by constructing messages to pass what you need to pass the your receiver(s) and seek thier feedback to ensure the effectiveess of your actions.

I do, rapport is an important thing to build trust among your customers and in order for them to be comfortable with you. A technique that I use is hooking the fish, I normally would bring up a topic that he/she will be interested in, like talking about the brand of phone that the customer is holding, or talk about his recent vacation, or how his day is going, or compliment him for his suit and ask where he got it, those random things that you normally observe during the first contact, so a good customer service rep will have keen observation in order to bring up a relative topic that the customer will be interested in, if the customer gets hooked with your topic, then good, if not, try another one, if the customer is still not interested and just nods at you, then dont proceed further with rapport building because he might be having a bad day. At least you have tried and you will definitely leave a mark on the customer even after your transcation has ended, it will give him the thought that "oh yeah, he is the guy that I talked to earlier ago, we had a good conversation, let me give him a good feedback"