Marketing & Management
How to Manage Your Staff to Provide a Superior Customer Experience
...by Bob Bartlett
During a recent visit to a local pet store to pick up food for my dog, I was struck by the lost opportunity of the store to retain my loyalty as a customer. After all, there is plenty of competition from independents and big box formats and I get to vote with my feet (or my car) for the store that meets my needs. Like most people, I am not only looking for the lowest possible cost but also a rewarding customer experience. To be honest, I will pay a little more if I feel good when I walk out of the store.
I won’t go to a store (more than once) that is poorly lit, dirty, out of stock, or is hard to shop. I will avoid stores where there is always a line at the checkout or where I cannot find help when I need it. Most stores that survive in the competitive marketplace will have taken care of (managed) those issues.
To paraphrase President Clinton, “it’s the customer experience stupid!” In the pet store it’s about pets. In a baby store it’s about babies. The customer experience must be a validation of the broad and deep emotions that we all experience when we celebrate, plan for, cope with, or care for a new baby.
A quick aside here - I was 52 when my second daughter was born. I went to the supermarket to get some welcome home balloons. “Oh wonderful, a new Grandpa are you?” said the cheerful sales clerk. “No, I’m the dad” I said. She started to apologize but I cut her off. There was nothing she did that spoiled my joyful mood. I told the story to my wife and we laughed - a great customer experience. For dads there is nothing, nothing better than walking around the supermarket with a brand new baby on one’s chest. Men are not usually smile magnets.
Back to your store. How do you manage your staff to provide a superior customer experience to all of your customers? I would hope that you are not relying on the merchandise and the other customers to do the talking. A superior customer experience requires leadership (by example), training and management.
In the heyday of specialty retail store start-ups, it was often thought that product and related knowledge was the most important criteria for hiring store managers. So Williams Sonoma looked for cooking enthusiasts and Pacific Sunwear looked for surfers. Pretty soon it was discovered that the skills that were most needed were sales and service related. Consumer needs and product knowledge could be centrally defined and skilled sales associates could be optimally trained and managed.
As an independent baby store operator, your challenge is to train and manage your staff to build customer loyalty, each time the customer comes into the store. There are plenty of resources that you can use to train your people. Just search on the Internet and you can easily find tools, firms and local individuals who can help. But you will make better decisions if you try it yourself first.
Who is your customer and what are their needs? They are mothers to be, grandfathers, friends from the office, new parents and so on. Each segment has different needs, questions and issues. So, train your sales associates to know your customer – to be able to “qualify” the customer by being responsive to their apparent needs. Develop scripts and role play the scripts on a regular basis. If you can identify new grandparents you can mine a rich vein of love and emotion and potentially create a new baby shopping tradition for the new parents.
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Don’t think that your young sales associates are worth the investment of training?
Shame on you.
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Feel uncomfortable about doing role playing?
That’s the problem that you and all your staff have – learning how to communicate effectively.
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Think your customers will be annoyed by being talked to?
Just think back to your most recent superior customer experience in another store.
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Have employees that will not give it a try?
Get new employees that will. Everyone (almost) wants to do a good job, show them how – empower them to help customers feel good about your store.
What aspects of your product and service offering should be presented to each customer segment? Is the store set up so that it is easy to communicate in this way? Do your sales associates know which items customers have told us they want to buy (the fast sellers)? Do they know why customers buy these items? – how they feel about them?
Knowing the answers to these questions is your job. So is training your staff to be able to:
- Qualify the customer,
- Present the right merchandise and service offering to the customer,
- Make the sale with add-ons as appropriate (no hard sell – let the customer buy), and
- Send the customer on their way with a warm glow and a smile.
Again, develop sales scripts and role play the scripts on a regular basis. Debrief on a regular basis, especially after you see a happy customer walking out of the store - what works, what doesn’t, who needs coaching on delivering or using the scripts. Get better (as a team) every time you serve a customer. A superior customer experience will keep them coming back.
About those scripts. We are all a little shy. Younger people especially may need to practice communicating with adults. My wife and I are put off when a sales associate presumes to address us by our first name from our credit card. On the other hand, I wish the pet store had asked me about my dog’s needs. If we are smart, we never stop learning how to communicate effectively.
Editorial provided by Bob Bartlett. Bob is a career management consultant to the retailing industry. His website is: www.bjaretailconsultants.com.
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