"Who" IS Your Store
by Judith Ann Hess, Customer Perspectives
An element of almost every retailer's marketing strategy today
is devoted to convincing potential customers that their stores
offer more friendly, efficient and personalized service than its
competitors. But do your customer contact personnel really live
up to this image? Or might they be inadvertently undermining every
advertising dollar you spend?
Clearly, your marketing dollars are ill spent if you fail to
upgrade the capabilities of your customer contact personnel. Advertising
promotes interested prospects, but these do not become or remain
customers if your store provides inadequate service.
Since management has neither the luxury nor the anonymity to
regularly observe the actual performance of customer service personnel,
how can you be sure they are routinely conveying the appropriate
image to their customers? After all, your marketing strategy is
only as good as your personnel are!
Many retailers attempt to upgrade quality service via training
programs but fail to include a system of information feedback.
If an investment in employee performance is crucial to your success,
only a continuous, systematic evaluation of your training efforts
will protect that investment.
Objective measurement of the quality of your service delivery,
as well as your training efforts, is as difficult as it is vital.
Although sales statistics are useful, there are too many variables
to isolate quality of service. Customer surveys are also informative,
but they can be both costly and time consuming. The alternative
- "shopping" - is a unique and relatively objective tool of measurement
that is remarkably free of these constraints.
In "shopping", (sometime called "mystery shopping"), trained
and supervised "shoppers" actually engage in typical transactions
with customer contact personnel and then rate specific attributes
from a customer's perspective. These include such traits as:
•
friendliness • attitude •
courtesy • product knowledge
• appearance •
sales ability
The ratings are done in a manner that allows easy comparisons
between employees, shifts, locations, and periods of time. This
provides important data about the effectiveness of your employee
selection and training, thus giving you a built-in, objective
and systematic feedback loop.
Comprehensive shopping audits can help you determine the effectiveness
of your internal marketing strategies so that you may upgrade
them, thereby enhancing your image, your service, and your market
share. You will, in effect, be minimizing human "turn-offs" and
thereby keeping the promises of satisfaction implicit in your
service offering.
