Trying Your Customer's Patience

Relay Teams Drop Batons

Relay teams drop batons.  Football players fumble the balls.  Baseball players throw the ball away.  Drivers fall asleep at the wheel.  And business operators and employees test the patience of their customers.

The speedsters do not try to miss the hand off in their relay.  The running back does not try to let the football slip away.  The ball player does not plan to release it into the dirt. And the driver of the car does not decide it is time to take a nap.  We do not mean to test our customer's patience...but more often than not, we do just that.  We have grown to remove ourselves from believing that customers want good service.  It is one of the great sickness effects owners and employees have come to protect.  We have grown up too big to stoop below our illusions we formed in egos and pride.  Many people actually believe that only really good people can behave like slaves and servants.  The rest of us have too much dignity to go out of our way and offer more than the extra mile.  Are you kidding me?  Find new employees.  Become a new employer!  If you prefer to win more races in business, you need to quit dropping the baton.  There is an earlier post you can visit...I think it is called something like the "villain."  It might be worth reading here.

We do not actually try to become terrible business leaders...it is an accident.  We just drop the baton once in awhile.  You can be one of those businesses that flourish during hard times.  Look at some of these simple examples.

Hidden Treasures Are Everywhere

Some of these examples have become so hidden in our market place that we do not even recognize them anymore.  The hardest part to seeing them is to accept that we have developed poor customer service polices in our business world.

Good service is one of the most common lip service events the world has ever known.  Serving a customer well is often times a process that belongs more closely to an after thought than it is about being the most important force that drives our every effort, at every moment.  We treat the lack of good service as a common piece of daily practice with enough routine effort that we no longer expect much more than making sure the customer fits neatly into the patterns of retail we lay out for them to perform.  We have driven this truth so long and deeply that we no longer even recognize how we force our customers into their own check out lines so they may save us money as they are offered 'non-payed jobs' to check themselves out.  The world has begun to accept the widespread level of poor service so deeply that even the customer does not raise the question as to why they do not get paid to perform their own checkout duties.  We justify the opportunity by giving them the choice.  In one isle they get a clerk to help them bag and check or they can select a group of open registers and serve themselves.  We trick them into believing they are empowered by doing it themselves.  What's more, we also justify this self-check opportunity by suggesting to them that they can do the work must faster as inexperienced checkers rather than our trained clerks in each line.  The assumption we sell on this dis-service policy is to imply that they can move along quicker if they serve themselves.  They can even use our registers and equipment for free.  We won't even charge them for looking up their own produce numbers and making their own change.

The progression of this retail service transition begs a serious question.  At which time will we eventually progress with this idea and begin to force the customer to check themselves out?   If you are a competitor, how does this progression become any part of good customer service?  We treat this kind of idea and many others like it as being a cool quotient to intelligent business mechanics, a clever part of creative cost cutting measures and a healthy sign of efficient strategy.  We actually pride ourselves when we find developments like this to introduce into our new methods of efficient service measures.  Get serious.  These are not even remotely close to representing good customer service policies.  The two concepts are not related.  They are not even cousins.

Someone has a limp.  Someone is wounded when these types of policies find their way into the process of retail management.  They are exactly there to help a competitor romp heavily on the opportunities abound.

Within One Mini-Mart Discovery Brings Out Many-Marts Of Ideas. 

This type of opportunity is what we call "snap."  Your head should jolt!  You should see a major "ah ha" moment with this kind of opportunity.  You should demand every employee that pumps the gas to check the oil, wash the windows and offer the driver personal service from the mini-mart inside.  Why should the driver ever leave the car?  Why should the driver ever go to any other lacking provider?  Fuel, cigarettes, candy, drinks, snacks...there are registers near the automobiles on the pump islands...employ runners to fetch the items the customer requests, move the fuel-filled autos to a nearby parking region where they can wait for the runners to return with the requested items...receipt in hand...allowing faster movement with the lined up autos waiting for fuel as the car ahead of them moves out of their way.  Think about this.  In our world we have become so lazy with good customer service that millions of great opportunities have popped up all around us if we are truly driven to see like we should be seeing.  This is what we call one of the three best "snaps" alive!  Or maybe you are stuck like many other millions who cannot jolt themselves out of the "normal" pattern of regular thinking and begin the work to separate your business model away from all of the other 'normal broke' businesses around you.  Every owner will find weak excuses as to why these good ideas will not work.  Stay broke.  Stay unrelevant.  Stay flat.

What A Great Time For Improving Customer Happiness.

In this post we only cover a minor few of the bountiful opportunites resting out there for some really sharp business operator to capitalize.  Quit searching for better ways to try your customers patience.  Redesign how you plan to treat them.  Your volume will follow your efforts to serve just fine.  Just in case we forgot...increasing volume is one of the good things we are trying to achieve.  I think it is time many owners begin to quit trying to find ways they can get out of doing things for their customers.  What a great time for improving customer service.

See you next time...work on your new customer service "snaps."  Make it fun and relevant.