Yup! It used to be called CUSTOMER SERVICE, but that idea has pretty much been blown out the window!
It’s absolutely amazing how businesses, especially small ones, treat their customers. I had a problem with the local establishment of a large, multi-national fast food chain who shall remain nameless to protect the clown’s reputation. They kept getting my order wrong. When I complained to the manager, he replied “Well, we’re no WORSE than anyone else in town!” Sure, go ahead! JUSTIFY your poor customer service! (BTW, they have gotten MUCH better since I sent that story to their corporate office!!! LOL)
I used to manage a small convenience store. The store was family owned, in a town that has EIGHT convenience stores with a mile of each other! The store was sold to new owners who had NO CLUE about customer service. When they insisted it be run by THEIR standards, business was falling off at the rate of 5% EVERY MONTH. When the owner went out of town for 5 weeks and let us run the store, we increased sales by 40%! FOURTY PERCENT!!! In only 5 weeks time!!! Two weeks after the owner returned, sales were back down to the same level as when he left!!
A parallel problem, in businesses managed from a central office by MBA’s who think that line workers are uniform, interchangeable parts, is the ‘one size fits all’ personnel policies.
When I first went to work for a national chain store the store manager was pretty autonomous. People were placed where they could do best and given assignments that kept the work interesting. Then the old guard at corporate headquarters turned over the reins to a new management team. Suddenly everybody had to do whatever a stone tablet from (headquarters city) said they should do that week - whether or not the specific task was within the person’s capabilities. (Arthritic fingers and cash registers are a VERY poor match!) Incentives to promote job satisfaction dried up. The store manager quit in disgust, to be replaced by a corporate robot.
At the same time, headquarters began bombarding the field with customer service messages, emphasizing how important it was - sort of like plastering shiny wall posters on a burned-out building.
When business declined, they blamed it on internet competition.
Obviously, nobody at corporate HQ had ever heard of Branson’s Law: “Take care of your people, and they will take care of your customers.”
How many stores do you go into where they greet you by name? Well, there’s my LHS, and, well, uh, that’s about it. Most stores only know your name when they’re holding your credit card.
In the modern world of retail, too often the people in the shops are interchangable, and they get changed frequently. Job satisfaction and job loyalty are both pretty low in these places. When a friendly, helpful face is no longer there, I like to think that they’ve moved on to a better job.
Remember that it works both ways, though. Try a big smile and a cheery “Good morning” when you get your breakfast grease and coffee at the drive-up window. I usually get one in return.
My LHS is great at customer service. They know me by name, give my club members a discount and will order anything we need, it doesn’t matter how small it is.
I remember hobby shops like that in Cleveland and Columbus Oh. They treated me great even as a little kid with not much money to spend. They’ve been in business a long time too. The ones here in Tn. act like your bothering them by walking through their door. Had to wait for one couple to stop yelling at each other so they could ring me up. I asked the owner of another shop when he was going to get more flex track in and he scowled at me and said “I’m not. Nobody buys that train stuff anymore.”