Shopping – you either love it or hate it. Mostly I fall into the former category but it is the one activity in life, when I’m most conscious of customer service, good and bad.
For me, customer service boils down to four basic things. Three I’m going to focus on in future blogs – they are listening, empathy and flexibility. But for these to have any impact, there has to be a solid foundation of knowledge and basic skills.
What do I mean? Well, let me relay one experience I had buying some towels in a large department store (I know, I have an exciting life!) When I got to the till I was told that some of the products I was purchasing were half price. No-one seemed to be aware of this fact until they were scanned, which rather begged the question, why bother reducing them?
Still, a bonus for me, and I wasn’t complaining. Then came that question we’ve all faced a hundred times: “Do you have one of our store cards?” I explained that I didn’t. “If you open one today, you’ll save another 20%.” Now, normally, based on previous experiences, I would politely decline such an offer but 20% was quite a lot of money and so I said yes, OK, I would apply for one of their store cards.
And this is where the real problems began. The two young members of staff behind the till had clearly been incentivised to offer store cards but in practice had a very limited knowledge of the process involved and lacked the basic skills needed to enter the data required accurately too. The whole process took more than 45 minutes (I’m not joking), after which I was told my application had been successful. However, when they then tried to use my ‘new card’ to complete the purchase, it didn’t work.
Eventually, I paid with my normal credit card (but still got my 20% discount). Unfortunately, and apparently by this stage it was all the till’s fault, the till didn’t produce a receipt when my transaction was complete. Clearly flummoxed by this state of affairs the shop assistant asked me to try again, a request I politely declined, explaining that I didn’t want to pay twice. Eventually a manager was summoned who was able to confirm that I had paid and produced a receipt from a computer ‘upstairs’.
In summary, I spent well over an hour completing a purchase that should have taken a minute or two, during which time the store lost two other customers to my knowledge who got fed up waiting.
The card that I had been sold did include some really good loyalty benefits and had my experience been better I probably would have adopted it as my preferred means of payment. But when, a week or so later, I received not one, but two new Mastercards, each with a different variation of my name, I immediately closed the account.
The end result? I saved a huge amount of money but ended up with a poorer impression of the organisation I purchased my towels from. The store lost customers, time, money and goodwill and didn’t in reality actually gain a new card customer either.
And it could all have been so different if someone somewhere had invested a little more time and money on really basic skills and knowledge training.
Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com
