Great customer service

I often talk about how customer service isn’t an add-on activity and that great service quality comes from everything you do as a retailer. That word “experience” is important here: great customer service is made up of lots of individual customer experiences and I much prefer using the word “experience” rather than “service”. It’s not a daft nod towards consultant blether. I reckon it’s easier to understand how to improve things if you think at the individual level: what can I do for each individual customer? How can I make their specific experience of my business a great one? But when you talk about service, it feels like a nebulous thing. It’s general and non-specific.

First and foremost, it’s worth talking about why most initiatives focused on service quality fail. Sometimes, a marketing team will take a look at their list of “things to do” and one of the bullet points will read “Make customers love us again” and they’ll commission an agency to come in and create some sort of “service event” for staff. They’ll then have jolly good fun taking this event around the business and into the store estate and they’ll say to people, “We order you, albeit in a nice way, to smile at customers and be their friends and love them so they will love us.”

And these one-off initiatives do often deliver big early uplifts in customer satisfaction, but then those gains die off, usually quickly, and, before long, everything returns to normal. That’s because the focus always moves on. No matter how committed a retailer is to raising customer service quality, there is always another issue waiting in the wings to occupy the minds of management and teams.

Permanent improvements in standards of customer care have to be earned from the ground up – you can’t change things by layering initiatives on to unstable foundations. Building from the ground up is harder work but, ultimately, more satisfying because gains become self-sustaining and permanent. Dieting is a good analogy. Crash-dieting creates instant weight loss but almost always results in a net weight gain once the focus slips. Changing eating behaviours, seeking support, changing attitudes to food and learning about nutrition means slower weight loss but, for most, permanent and self-sustaining success.

“Self-sustaining” is the key phrase. A successful assault on changing the behaviours and relationships that lead employees to want to deliver great customer experiences becomes a positive viral thing. Changes feel good, staff get more from their employment experience and customers get more from shopping the business. Even better, these changes reinforce each other in a virtuous circle:

Happier staff → better customer experience → happier customers → better interaction with staff → happier staff … and round and round

Better still, that loop delivers gains in revenue and profit and draws in improvements in employee retention and contributes to reductions in employment costs. It is an absolute win-win.

Do what?

Here’s a bunch of things you can do to make sure that you and your team are delivering great customer experiences and that you send your customers away delighted. These thoughts must be taken in the context of the seven secrets of retail. There is a huge amount there that sets the service experience context. They are the basics of creating great experiences.

• Employee satisfaction: I’ve probably gone on a bit about this, but it’s worth saying again: put into practice the stuff in the “Team” section of this book. The most effective way to ensure your team are delivering better experiences is to improve the satisfaction of your staff. Having a reward and bonus programme based around customer satisfaction scores can be really effective too. It helps your team to make a direct link between how they look after customers and what goes into their own pockets.
• Simplify: be simple and straightforward for customers. Make promotions easy to understand and simple to redeem. Use plain language in your advertising and communications and be clear about what you can and can’t do. Set up as something recognisably positive and then be that.
• Deliver on the promise of your Big Idea: whatever that Big Idea is, it is also a promise to your customers that you will be what you say you are. If a customer is coming to your business expecting you to be X, then make sure that you really are X and keep looking out for all those things you could be doing that serve to support and emphasise that.
• Meet the fundamental discovery need: all shopping is about discovery, so help your customers to make those great discoveries. Surprise, delight, inspire and wow them. Be proud of your stock, make heroes out of the amazing and brilliant and, above all, make sure your people are knowledgeable, that they, themselves, have access to your product and that they are open-minded enough to listen to customers’ real needs and then to find great ways to meet those. Celebrating the hero products applies just as much online as in-store, so make sure your web store is full of accessible ways in, dotted with stand-out products, and that it doesn’t become an illustrated spreadsheet.
• Be consistent: make sure your team are on top every day – make sure you exceed company standards, stay on top of your game. And across the company ensure that the experience is great, in every store, on every site, through your apps and into every order, every time. Easy to say, but consistency is something that appears near the top when researching customer likes.
• Fix problems directly: Any one of us could end up on Watchdog one day with Anne Robinson’s curiously wonky face looming as she tells us that we are the devil incarnate. That’s just the way the world is, but we can reduce our chances of this happening by accepting that we will make mistakes sometimes and then by getting on and fixing those problems quickly, fairly and with a smile.
• Feedback: making it easy for customers to give feedback to you is critical in improving service quality. If you haven’t got a customer complaint process, one that’s easy for customers to use, create one. Give customers quality surveys that they can fill in and send back to you. Give them pre-paid envelopes to make it even easier for them to do that. Give out your personal email address and watch for social media mentions. Encourage complaints and think of them as free market research. Some customers will rant and rage but at the heart of almost every complaint is a truth that, once learned, will help you make your business better. Oh, and it’s far better that customers complain to you, and that you resolve their complaints, than it is for them to complain about you to their friends instead. On social media, where those complaints are public, get in early, be generous and decisive. There are a number of open tools available that aggregate your social media mentions and that can be useful to build a picture of positive/negative sentiment; one good one is www.socialmention.com.
• Be honest and open: if you don’t know the answer to something, say so and then find out. Be ready to admit your mistakes and involve your team and your customers in fixing things and in improving the business. Have an open mind in all situations. Make sure you set the culture where your people feel safe to follow your lead in admitting mistakes and admitting they need help. Customers will benefit.
• Don’t pay sales commission: put your people on individual sales commissions and some of them will shark your customers, especially in-store. That’s simple, straightforward human nature. The best service organisations pay people bonuses based on customer satisfaction combined with something reflecting overall store profit performance. Or just be a great employer and give your front-line people good salaries. Some of the happiest, most satisfied customers in the USA are customers of the Container Store: “Our salespeople do not work on commission; instead, they’re either salaried or paid by the hour with wages far above the retail industry norm. Therefore, they often work together in teams to find that complete solution for the customer, which allows them to spend as much time as necessary to help customers find what they need.” That’s smart retail right there.
• Smile and be nice: okay, I’m not talking the rictus grins of the retail damned, but do try to put your troubles to one side when dealing with your team and your customers. Use the great opportunity you have as a retailer to talk to people, enjoy their company and appreciate the fact that you’re not stuck in an office staring at the same ten faces all day every day and fearing your turn on the tea run. Retail is ace like that. For every mean-spirited or rude customer, you’ll work with a hundred who are good fun, who are loving spending their money. Shopping is fun – have fun yourself, you old misery.
• Respect your people and they’ll respect your customers: treat people how you yourself would like to be treated. Be nice, be respectful, give the benefit of the doubt and remember that your people are grown-ups. Treat your team that way and they’ll do the same with your customers.
• Living and breathing it: Every decision you make must be in the context of will it be good for customers. Every person you hire must be someone you think customers will enjoy being served by and every process, promotion and event you choose must be for the benefit and delight of customers. Delivering great customer experiences is not a bolt-on activity – it is the only activity. Every word in this book is written in the context of great customer service.

The four rules of performance improvement

If we are looking at customer experiences, it is also important to consider why we might be keen to deliver such good ones. It’s because we want to take more money. If you don’t agree, then you’ve spent too long listening to new-age consultants who will break your business faster than you can. So we’re looking for performance improvements, but where do those actually come from?

There is no secret to performance improvement. The techniques can all be learned. It’s about getting the details right and paying attention to the fundamentals, checking you’re consistently hitting the right line.

The rules of performance improvement are beautifully simple and there are only four of them:

• Sell to new customers.
• Sell more in each transaction.
• Persuade existing customers to return to your business more often.
• Improve margin by cutting overheads and improving sales quality.

This is another of those “it’s not rocket science” moments. The challenge is, of course, in understanding how best to apply each rule. Smart Retail deals with those things you can do to produce direct results from applying these rules to your customers. People, site and store issues also have a part to play in the successful application of these rules, but it is what you can do directly for the customer that has the most significant impact.

If I was forced to choose just one of the four rules of performance improvement over all others, the one I would pick is the second one: sell more in each transaction. Driving up average transaction values is all about maximising every opportunity. That in itself is a powerful business improvement philosophy. Making the very best of every customer who clicks on you or walks into your store is your absolute priority.

Transaction values is about maximising every opportunity

All of the tools I’ve written about in the secrets sections will have an effect on average transaction values, but it’s worth pulling a few thoughts out quickly.

Make selection easy by curating choice

Helping customers to find the thing that meets their need states the best is critical and that extends to impulse buys. Don’t crowd the tills; pick out a small number of products that are easy to say yes to as an add-on to their main purchase.

A nudge in the right direction

Use calls to action, such as limited availability, when-it’s-gone-it’s-gone deals, exclusive colour options for a season, and so on. These must be honest deals and they must be of obvious intrinsic value.