Today’s busy retailers are ever more challenged to achieve amazing sales, a fabulous visual proposition and deliver exceptional customer service – and all on a shoe string budget.
As more and more retailers fall by the wayside in today’s harsh climate, the watchword has become more and more about saving costs. As the old saying goes...’Sales for Vanity and Profit for Sanity’
The workforce is the biggest cost that any retailer has and is also the key cost that can be really influenced and controlled by a good Store Manager; however this has led to a severe slashing of staff and is now being keenly felt by most Customers that walk through your door.
We all accept that tasking is a necessary evil and Customers would sometimes be staggered by what goes on behind the scenes in order to ensure a shop is ‘customer ready’. Indeed, when I was a Store Manager, I remember one of my friends asking me if I would be finished at 5:00pm. I can still see her amazement, when I told her, that firstly we did not close until 5:30pm and that then we would need to recover the sales floor, do a small visual move of the product, cash up and prepare for the following day. Therefore escaping at 5:00pm was highly unlikely!
With the current cull of staff, this is becoming more and more apparent to the Customer and we are beginning to create a culture where the Customer can be ignored when staff are so busy and tasks have become a priority.
Whilst I appreciate that there is an enormous amount of work that needs to go on ‘behind the scenes’ to get a store ready for business, I am sometimes left wondering, ‘how high on the task list is Customer Service?’
I recently visited a store at lunchtime, only to find them in the middle of preparing for their sale. The whole team was fixated on identifying the sale product and starting to move the sales floor around and separate sale from non-sale. Whereas I understand that this needed to be done, this was at the expense of the customers that were in the store and wanting to buy something there and then. They were 'tormenting their existing customers' and potentially losing sales...
So what is the resolve?
The simple answer would be to increase staffing to ensure that both service and tasks. This isn’t always an option – so what else can you do?
Well, firstly it is always important to try and task in your quieter timeslots – review your traffic and ensure that when Customer footfall is at its highest – that you are maximising all opportunities.
Secondly, is to try and prioritise your tasks into what is and isn’t business critical. Also be mindful about what tasks can disrupt your sales floor and be overly obvious to your Customer. The analogy of the swan is a good one – the customer should never be able to see all the frantic paddling which is going on under the service.
Think about who is best suited to a particular task and can therefore do it the best and also the most efficiently. Matching the right people to the right job is one of the keys to effective management.
Finally and most importantly, it is always critical to remember that the Customer is the real reason why you are there and they should ALWAYS be the priority! If that is not the case in your store – perhaps you need to review this.
And try not to ‘torment your customers by tasking’???
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