Poor Customer Care Is The Death Knell of Retail

Two rules of customer care.  

Customers know when you take short cuts. 
Therefore, customer service is king.  

There is no doubt that traditional retail is struggling while online retail is booming.  Everything from your air filters to your contact lens can be purchased online right now.  In fact, they just show up when you need them.   

The one thing that traditional retail has is personal customer service.  Face to face care cannot be replaced by a mouse click or a subscription.  On the other hand, poor customer service may be the death knell to retail.  

Case in point.  My wife and I are going to a charity dinner this weekend, and I need a new suit.  No stranger to a good deal, I visit the local JC Penny because they are advertising deep discounts.  I struggle to find anyone to help me, but finally a sales person does.   

Eventually, I take my suits to the dressing room to try things on.  There, I find a dressing room log.  This is when employees make a sweep to make sure the area is clean and to gather up any clothes that customers chose not to by.  

The log has places for initials to show that an employee did their job.  And what did I notice?  The section for the 4:30pm check was initialed.  The problem was that it was 3:24pm.  The last person who checked the dressing room just went ahead and initialed for their next rotation as well.  What does it matter, right?  

Now, this error didn’t keep me from purchasing my suit (it looks great by the way), but it did show me that the employees didn’t care and the supervisor wasn’t paying attention.  Subconsciously, I may tell myself next time that if all I want is a cheap price, I can get that online with a good return policy.  

For you, make your customer’s experience the heighth of their day.  Go the extra step both in execution and supervision.  Make sure your customers have a reason to shop with you and not your online competitor.   Better customer interaction is all you can argue with when it comes to online competition.   

​Gordon Duncan  

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