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Category: Customer Service

Once Size Does Not Fit All

I am doing a training next week for a number of different businesses on Shareworthy Customer Service (with Tim Miles who deserves credit for coining the term Shareworthy). I have been doing a little research on each of these businesses to make sure that what I teach will fit for each business because when it comes to Customer Service, one size does not fit all.

Too many of the books I have read on Customer Service focus on teaching your staff a simple, repeatable system. Their system, they write, is the one and only way to offer great customer service (sarcasm fully intended).

There isn’t a one and only way. Heck, for each business there are a handful of different ways to offer memorable and shareworthy customer service. Don’t get me wrong. There are founding principles behind Shareworthy Customer Service.  There are characteristics that are similar for all businesses. But the systems each company must implement have to be unique and flexible to truly be shareworthy.  Focusing only on the system, not the reason behind the system, guarantees that your company will meet the letter of the law, while never grasping the spirit and never really being shareworthy.

GREETING YOUR CUSTOMERS

For instance, we all know that it is important to greet customers when they walk through the door. The other day I entered a Rite-Aid store and heard a voice cry out “Hello! Welcome to Rite-Aid.” I looked around and saw no one. There was a stack of boxes a couple aisles over. I heard some rustling behind the boxes. Sure enough, a young gal was down on her hands and knees stocking the shelves. She heard the automatic doors open, assumed someone was walking through, and because she was trained to greet every customer, yelled out her greeting over the stack of boxes.

This is the back of the “Pick up orders here” sign in the pharmacy at  our Rite-Aid
(as seen through the drive-thru window)

She thought she was giving great customer service because she was doing what the system told her to do. I don’t blame her. But here I am – with you nodding in agreement – telling her tale as an example of far less than shareworthy customer service.

Now, if she was taught that it was important for customers to be greeted so that they actually felt welcome, that they felt important, that they felt like you were there to serve them, then she might have stood up, looked me in the eye, welcomed me, see if I needed any direct assistance, and explained that she was available and could be interrupted if necessary. Nope, instead she was taught a system – greet every customer.

Shareworthy Customer Service should be the goal for every independent retailer. But before you simply put a system in place, make sure you know why the system is there and what the goal is for each step. Then make sure you build some flexibility in so that when the system fails the goal, you can momentarily change the system.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS There are still a few seats available for next week’s class. Come to Austin, Texas. Tim and I will teach you the foundation for SCS and how to implement systems that make sense for your business. Soon they will be writing books about your legendary customer service, too.

Convenience Trumps Price

I’ve been telling you all this for years. Price is not the only thing. Convenience trumps price both in the store and more importantly online, too!

Here’s the proof.

Quoting the article…

Continuum’s 2012 Service Design Report looked at data from more than 1,000 consumers across the country and uncovered the top reasons they choose whether to shop in-stores or online.

The top reasons respondents say they shop in stores are:
• For convenience (40%);
• They don’t trust the quality online (22%);
• They don’t want to pay for shipping/returns (17 %);
• For better prices (17%); and
• For personal interaction (4%).

The top reasons respondents say they shop online are:
• For convenience (43%);
• It is easier to find what they are looking for (29%);
• For better prices (25%); and
• To avoid interaction with employees (3%).

(Doing a tiny little happy dance.)

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS That begs the question… How do you become more convenient? Come to Austin, TX January 29-30 and I’ll show you.

A Reason to Belong

For those of you who have read the new book Pendulum about the shifting outlook of society, you will remember that we are ten years into a “We” cycle. We still have another 30 years to go.

For those who haven’t read the book (and I believe it may be the single most important book you can read for business), the general concept is that there is a 80 year swing in society between two prevailing outlooks – Me and We – each taking about 40 years of that swing.

A “We” cycle has “community” and “collaboration” as two of the main themes. People want to belong and be a part of something.

One way to use this understanding is to help people feel like they belong to your store. You probably already have a FB page and have a bunch of “likes”. But how do you transfer that into a “community”? How do you turn those casual likers into loyal insiders?

Make them feel special.

Two ways you can do this…

  1. Insider information
  2. Shared unique experiences

Insider Information

People love little secrets. Men, especially, love secrets because men speak vertically – did what I say make you think higher of me or lower of me? Knowing little tidbits of information that most people don’t know gives men a chance to say something that will make you think higher of them (at least that’s how we perceive it, ladies, bear with us on this).

Ladies also like secrets. Unlike men, ladies speak more horizontally – did what I say draw me in closer or push me away? Ladies want to be in the inner circle. They feel special when they know the secret handshake. Little tidbits of information make them feel like they belong and also give them something to share with others and draw others into their inner circle.

Sharing personal stories, fun facts, and insider information with your fan base builds a level of loyalty among those who are in the know. Just keep it positive and interesting (i.e. did you know that the same man – Tom Murdough Jr – invented both Little Tikes and Step2? Yes, he went into business a second time just to compete with the first business he created!) Two examples of entities that have created a loyal band of followers… Lady Gaga & her Little Monsters and Jimmy Buffet & his Parrotheads. When your fans give themselves a name, you’ve done your job well.

Shared Unique Experiences

We have a special kindred spirit when we share a unique experience with other people. Those strangers become less strange. There is a nod of understanding between the people who have had those moments, a nod of “I-know-you-know-exactly-what-I’m-thinking”.

When you do something completely and uniquely different than any other retailer out there, you’ll get your customers giving those nods to other customers.  They will feel like they belong to something special. The best thing is that they will want to bring their friends into this inner circle.

The key is that the experience has to be unique and special and unadvertised. For example, when I was in the world of rock climbing, there was a gal in Colorado who was the best at resoling rock climbing shoes. Many climbers I knew sent their shoes to her. And she sent them back, resoled. The unique experience, simple as it may sound, was that in the box she included a Jolly Rancher candy. If you saw a guy with newly resoled shoes, all you had to do was ask, “What flavor?” If he had sent his shoes to Jules, he knew exactly what you meant and responded right away.

In a “We” cycle people want to belong to something special. Give them something special with your business and they’ll be naming themselves soon enough.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Once you get your fans to become so loyal they name themselves, you can stop spending money on regular advertising. They’ll do all the advertising for you.

Most Missed Posts from 2012

I posted my top ten most viewed posts in 2012.

In all fairness and just for fun, here are the bottom ten – the ten least viewed posts (although I like to think they were just missed.)

Read on if you dare…

10. From the Mouth of Babes – Two great lessons on Customer Service I learned on a field trip with a bus full of fifth graders.

9. Don’t Marry Your Inventory – Some of the best advice ever on how to manage your inventory better and make it work harder for you.

8. Thoughts From a Wedding – Four really simple but important ideas I got from a wedding I attended.

7. Politics and a Plan – How to be prepared for the unexpected and not have to play the blame game.

6. Stay Above the Fray – Why negative advertising is so powerful in politics and so dangerous in retail

5. Make it More Fun – An NRF study said 78% of consumers would shop somewhere else if they thought it was more fun. Here are ways to make your business more fun.

4. Thanks! It Works! – The power of saying “Thank You!” and how those two simple words can make a huge difference for your business.

3. Tell Me a Story – Emotions move the needle far better than data. Stories are powerful. Are you telling yours?

2. Measuring People – Three different ways to “measure” your staff to make sure you are getting the most out of the investment you put into them,

1. What Do They Know? – One simple thing you can do to become more knowledgeable about the products you sell.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

Top Viewed Blog Posts 2012

Everyone loves Top Ten Lists.

Here is my list of my Top Ten Most Viewed Blog Posts from 2012

1. Two Thing You Can Correct Right Now – Two simple things you can do that won’t cost you an arm and a leg, but will make the next year better than the previous year.

2. Lessons From MLK Quotes – Five of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and how they apply to independent retailers.

3. Two Days to Take Your Customer Service to Shareworthy Levels – Announcing a class I am teaching alongside Tim Miles at Wizard Academy on January 29-30. (You really should go!)

4. What to Do About Showrooming – We all face the problem of customers walking in with smart phones, checking out our product, asking our advice, getting our knowledge, scanning the UPC codes and buying it online. You might be surprised at my answer to this ever-growing problem.

5. This Will Be a Successful Year If… – A different, better approach to the dreaded New Year’s Resolution (Appropriate that this would make today’s list. By the way – I accomplished three out of four!)

6. Is JC Penney Making a Mistake? – They announced their new pricing policy at the beginning of last year. I had my opinions on whether it could work or not. Go see if I was right.

7. The Goldilocks Effect – I was egged on by a friend in another online group to discuss this inventory management topic about how to stock and merchandise your store to fit the needs of your customer base better. Apparently other people liked the topic, too.

8. Tell Me About a Time When… – The absolute best interview questions you should be asking!

9. Shopping Local Benefit Salt Lake City – Mostly a link to a great article about a study done in Salt Lake City. Either I have a lot of fans in Salt Lake City or people love to read more articles about the positive impact of shopping local. (You should forward the article to everyone you know in your local and county government economic development positions.)

10. Fair and Square – Another post about the JC Penney pricing fiasco. Their idea was right. Their implementation was wrong, wrong, wrong. Don’t look at their failure as a policy problem, only an implementation problem.

Definitely an interesting mix of posts, don’t you think? Covers a wide gamut from Hiring to Customer Service to Inventory Management to Shop Local to Pricing to Leadership.

Thank you to all who are following publicly, lurking quietly, or just plain stumbling onto this blog by accident. If there are topics you would like me to write about more in 2013, please let me know. I get the feeling the indie retail movement is on the cusp of some serious positive growth over the next few years.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS One of the reasons I believe we’ll see more people Shop Local, Shop Independent is because of a sense of community that they feel at your stores. If you have not yet read the book Pendulum, you need to go get it today. “Sense of Community” will be a driving force for the next decade at least. You should be playing up that aspect of your business.

Asking the Right Question

Seth Godin writes one of my favorite blogs. His post for today was so short and sweet and thought-provoking that I want to share it with you…

Question the question
The best creative solutions don’t come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented.
They come from inventing new questions.
-Seth Godin

Here are my thoughts…

The question most retailers ask is…

How can I get more traffic, more customers, more sales?

Here is a new question worth considering…

How can I create an experience so incredible that people want to come back time and again and bring their friends with them?

Here is another question…

What did I not do to the best of my ability last year?

Here is yet one more question…

How can I make the customer experience not only better, but more consistently better?

I bet if you answer any one of those last three questions, you’ll find the answer to the first question.

Merry Christmas!
-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Yes, I ask those questions every year for my business. Yes, I will be giving you the answers at the class Tim Miles and I are teaching at Wizard Academy January 29-30. Yes, you will learn enough to make a huge difference in your business – a double-digit difference if history is any indicator.

Handling Multiple Customers at Once

This is the time of year when the customers outnumber the staff. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because extra traffic means extra sales. Bad because you cannot give each customer the time they need to maximize those extra sales and you often lose a customer while you’re working with another customer.

Years ago I read a tip in a book for how to handle multiple customers at once. I hated the book and have long ago forgotten the title and author, but that one tip has remained with me.

Understand that just like multi-tasking where you actually do not do two things at once, you cannot (or should not) try to sell two people at once -unless they want the same product for the same reasons. So if you have two customers who need help, an easy way to handle that is to ask the first customer permission to greet the second customer.

“Excuse me, but would you mind if I go greet that other customer and let them know that I will help them after we are done here?”

Your first customer will agree, which accomplishes two things. First, they have given you permission to talk to the other customer. Second, they have given implicit acknowledgment that they will stay until you return.

When you get to the second customer, say…

“Hello, thanks for coming in. My name is Phil. I am working with another customer at the moment. As soon as I am done, I will be right over to help you. Is that okay?”

That last question is the kicker. When customer #2 says yes, they have now given you explicit permission to go finish up with customer #1 and also acknowledged that they will stay until you are back. Sometimes, however, they will say no because they have a simple request that only takes a second or they are in a big rush. If that is the case and you believe you should serve them ahead of the first customer, simply ask their permission to go back to customer #1 to explain.

When you ask your customer’s permission, you get them to commit to getting your assistance. Everyone gets helped and everyone leaves the store happy. Win-Win.

Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Tips like these are easy. Setting up a culture where shareworthy customer service happens every day all the time takes a little bit more work. The payoffs for that work, however, will show up in big ways on your bottom line. Want to learn how to set up the right culture and the right systems for delighting customers enough that they brag about it to others? Come to Austin, Texas in late January.

Snapshots in Time

One thing that used to drive me crazy in retail was when we had just finished with a huge rush of customers, finally got a moment to breathe, and at that exact moment my father would walk out, see us standing around and yell at us to get busy since we were obviously loafing.

Had he walked out two minutes earlier, he would have seen poetry in motion as the staff expertly handled all the customers, the giftwrapping, the phone calls, and the interruptions with grace and ease. But no, he caught us two minutes later taking a deep breath.

I made a pledge that when I was boss I would never make snap judgments on the snapshot in time.

One brush stroke does not make a masterpiece painting. One snapshot does not make a complete album.

Let’s play a little math game (feel free to skip the next paragraph if you’re not up to math today).

Yesterday we had a decent day serving 256 customers. I had 97 employee hours scheduled which breaks down to 2.6 customers per hour per employee.  The average actual interaction with a customer is around ten minutes of their time in the store, or 26 minutes out of each hour.  That means each employee had more non-interactive time than interactive time. The likelihood of me walking out of my office and catching them not engaged with a customer was greater than catching them engaged.

(Okay, math over)

The key for me is to walk out enough to catch them when they are engaged and observe how they handle that engagement.

There are ebbs and flows of customers in any retail business. If all you ever do is catch your employees goofing off, before you yell at them, realize that the real problem might be that you aren’t leaving your office enough.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I reminded one of my new hires today that we are not just creating sales today, we are creating sales a generation from now when the kids in the store today have kids of their own.  Kinda changes the engagement when think like that, don’t you think?

PPS Remember also that there is a fine line between goofing off and having fun. Since Having Fun is part of our Character Diamond, it is almost impossible for me to catch them goofing off. Such is life in a toy store:-)

Why You Should Go to Austin, Part 2

Yesterday I told you my three answers to Wizard Academy Vice Chancellor Michele Miller’s questions about the Shareworthy Customer Service class I am teaching with Tim Miles January 29-30.

Here are Tim’s answers…

Michele: How did you two come up with the idea of teaching this class?
Tim: About a year ago, two things happened in the same week.

One – one of my clients said to me, “Tim, I’m a liar.” He was becoming aware that his employees weren’t living up the promises we were making in his ad campaign. Since then, his customer service scores (measured by the same Net Promoter Score system used by Amazon, Apple, Trader Joe’s, and countless others) have risen to twenty points higher than Apple’s.

Two – Best Buy made my mom cry. Well, the CEO didn’t make her cry, but one of their Geek Squad members was so rude and condescending to my 76-year-old-non-cryer mother that I couldn’t sit idly by. I did what lots of people do: I took to the Internet and blogged about it to a couple thousand people, and I put it on all my social media outlets. Now, Best Buy’s stock is tanking. Is Trish the reason? Not specifically, but it got me wondering if something systemic was causing companies like Best Buy to miss the proverbial boat.

Michele: We see lots of workshops on creating good customer service. Your course description looks intriguing – what is one thing that sets this course apart from others out there?
Tim: Is our course different? I think so.

For one thing, it’s not just about “being nicer to people,” but rather it’s about building a system that measures and rewards customer delight. It’s about budgeting for it. It’s about where that budget comes from and how to implement it and how to build a culture of ownership among your employees.

Additionally, we went through hundreds of accounts of delightful customer experiences from the very best companies – large and small – in the world, and we deconstructed what made them great. Turns out there are only fourteen different defining characteristics to customer delight, and you can tune them to suit your business.

Michele: What is the most important thing students will walk away with?
Tim: They’ll have a customized plan to build and implement a program that’s currently working for every one of our clients that began using it this year. They’ll begin to spend less in advertising. They’ll create a culture where employees love coming to work BUT aren’t working longer hours or particularly harder while they’re working. They’ll be the one company in town where the best specialists in their business category WANT to work.

Not a bad way to spend two days, huh? Come join us in Austin.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

Why You Should Go to Austin in January

You should go to Austin, Texas at the end of January. Really, you should. It will be more than worth your while.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, January 29th and 30th, I’m teaching a new class about Shareworthy Customer Service at the 21st Century Business School known as Wizard Academy with a fellow named Tim Miles. It’s a magical place in the hill country just southwest of Austin, Texas. This week, Vice Chancellor Michele Miller asked me three questions about the class so she could promote it in the newsletter that goes out to thousands of alumni. Here are my answers. (Tomorrow, I’ll share Tim’s answers.)

Michele: How did you come up with the idea of teaching this class?
Me: Tim asked me:-)

(I believe Tim asked me because Tim reads this blog, follows the work I have been doing to teach multiple aspects of customer service to retail businesses, knows that I know what Wizard Academy is all about, and because Tim’s expertise, while far greater than mine, leans more heavily on service-based businesses. Remind me, and I’ll ask him when we get there if this is true.)

Michele: We see lots of workshops on creating good customer service. Your course description looks intriguing – what is one thing that sets this course apart from others out there?
Phil: I see two problems with most customer service training programs…

First, there is no standard definition for what is Great Customer Service. Everyone seems to have their own opinion ranging from “slightly better than what my competitors do” at the low end to “WOW-ing my customers beyond their wildest expectations” at the upper end. And most businesses have an unrealistic idea of their own level of customer service.  Without a definition, it is hard to objectively see where you stand. Without a definition it is hard to measure results. Without a definition it is hard to create consistency. What drew me to Tim’s teachings and made me want to partner with him is that he and I share the same definition of great customer service – so good, the customer has to share it with others. We both teach from that upper end and show businesses how that level of service is within their grasp once they identify it.

The second problem with most customer service training programs is that they often focus solely on the interaction between employee and customer, creating scripted interactions that eliminate the worst elements of customer service but don’t really delight customers in a Shareworthy way. Although employee/customer interaction is one of the most important elements of customer service, it is not the only one. You can improve your employee/customer interactions exponentially and still be undone by a poor website, a confusing policy, a complicated form, or even a dirty restroom. Tim and I both recognize that to reach the pinnacle of customer service, it takes more than just employee/customer interactions, and it takes more than just scripted role plays. We’ll address all of those elements and show businesses how to make sure everything is aimed at delighting the customer.

What sets our program apart is that we break down the whole concept of customer service – every single element – into understandable and measurable parts. We help each business create a definition by which success can be measured. Then we teach those attending how to create a culture that reaches that level of success consistently and in every aspect of their business.

Michele: What is the most important thing students will walk away with?
Me: There are so many walk-aways that it would be hard to name just one. The segments I will be teaching include four topics that stand alone on their own merit. Add in what Tim will teach and there will be more walk-aways than most people can fit in their luggage. The cool thing is that much of what the attendees will learn can be implemented right away and will start showing a return right away. Instant ROI!

At the end of the two days, what will really take place is an understanding of this whole new definition of customer service, of where the bar can and should be raised. After that, the businesses will have a tool box full of ways to consistently hit and exceed those standards.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I forgot to add… Not only will you make back your investment many times over, you’ll make new friends, eat great food, and have more fun learning than you ever thought possible!