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October 10, 2012
The Customer Experience: Should retail buyers just start creating their own?
When the seller won't give the customer a better service alternative or a choice, and its competition is just as bad, nothing happens until customers at a "store level" pipe up. You need a bit of a revolution to change bosses and companies who have decided they do not need to change.
It could be on store floors or phone lines--but lots (if not all) of us retail customers daily deal with companies that have decided (a) to never exceed your expectations and (b) to never give you an easy choice. Switch stores or banks, you say? Most of us know that the competition is just as bad.
At this blog, we believe that these kinds of companies need daily en masse demonstrations of acting up. Don't worry. Your message will eventually get relayed from thick store clerks and forms of plant life called "customer service representatives" up to a few bosses, officers and board members. But we have got to get off our knees. Don't completely lose it with them, folks. No violence, of course. No yelling.
You will, however, need to try to make clerks and CSRs uncomfortable and a bit anxious about your unhappiness. They, too, want to work in happy shops. Even though Western logic often fails to reach them quickly, do have something clever or reasonably intelligent--but strong--to say. Make sure you have some fun, though. Stores are great because you can do it in public. "Jason [from nametag], I have all this money with me and I need to buy something you sell here--are you ready to help me yet?" Stuff like that. But say it loud so other customers can hear you and join in.
Folks, you are the customers, buyers, fiduciaries, clients. Do something.
Not going to take it any more: Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network (1976). Finch won a posthumous Oscar for the role.
Posted by JD Hull at October 10, 2012 11:32 PM
Comments
"Thick store clerks" are the result of the mating of minimum-wage and distant boards. They are ambiguous among too-big-to-succeed corporations. The ones that are smart but do it anyway may have had a small business that went belly-up due to the large corporation now known as their employer. I agree that these business need the reward of your revenue removed, but it's their fault from the top down, not just the clerk you're finding cantankerous.
Posted by: kpdriscoll at October 10, 2012 03:20 PM
Agreed, Kevin. But we're not trying to get to the clerks here. Trying to get to their bosses.
Posted by: Hull at October 10, 2012 10:16 PM