I had to buy some new hardware over the weekend, in fact I should have bought it about a year ago but have been delaying but that’s a different story. This was not a happy shopping experience, and got me thinking about how some organisations have lost sight of how to provide their customers with the service they need…and instead focus on the service they think is important.
Every company or organization (large or small) has one big question to ask itself before any program and that includes marketing, customer service and research – How can we make the organization more useful?
For every business this will be different depending on what they do. If you are a restaurant, then it could be how can we make it easy for customers to book or how can we let them know how good our food is? For lawyers, it might be how can we get free, understandable advice to potential clients? For a sports team it should be how can we build closer relationships to our fans? The store in question was a major high street retailer so, n this instance, it should have been how can we make it as easy as possible for him to buy from us. To give you an idea of my pain, it went something like this.
Saturday – A reconnaissance mission online and then to the physical stores identified the hardware needed. (I should add at this point, I couldn’t buy the goods at that point due to a curveball from the bank), when asking if I could reserve the products, the answer was No as they only had one in stock and couldn’t reserve their last one.
Sunday morning – I call the companies central customer service line who said not to return to the store nearest me as they still only had one in stock and instead, I should drive twenty five minutes to a different store where “they had over six in stock”.
Sunday early afternoon – I arrive at store with my reservation code. (note – a frightening number of store employees were on the floor, but all rigorously sticking to their patches, which were empty but it seemed they couldn’t take any initiative and help a customer in a different zone). I was told to go and queue up for the reservations and spend those fifteen minutes wondering why one of the available staff couldn’t jump in and help? Finally I reach the front of the queue to be told to go back to the floor staff as they have to get it from the stock room. A store assistant returns looking worried and calls for reinforcements. Four of them huddle round their in store stock system then one breaks off to inform me they have none in stock.
I ask the usual questions, which get me no where so decide (with my limited but comparable IT knowledge) to have a look at the stock system. After a couple of minutes I start to sympathize with the staff as whoever implemented this isn’t giving them a chance to do their job. The system was clunky, and more importantly was lying to them, apparently there were four of the items I wanted in stock! The good news was they ‘definitely’ had some in stock at their store another twenty five minutes away.
Sunday, late afternoon. Finally manage to buy what I wanted a day and a half late.
When the red mist dispersed, I was left contemplating the following points from the experience:-
- It wasn’t the staff on the floor’s fault. They aren’t being trained properly on the importance of customer service.
- They aren’t being given the technical tools to do their job properly even if they wanted to.
- There were too many bodies on the floor. Stores think that having more bodies on the ground will equal better customer service, it doesn’t – better trained and motivated staff equals better customer service. Having lots of people there while not providing excellent service adds insult to injury!
- They aren’t being paid enough to care (unconfirmed but a good guess)
To re-iterate , If you are in the retail game, the answer to “how do we make the organization more useful to the customers” is - Make it easy for them to buy your products. This means looking at the holistic experience a customer will have online and offline. As soon as it is established that this customer wants to buy from you, there should be multiple touchpoints to facilitate the sale – over the phone, in the store, through the website, via social media channels...wherever the customer wants!
