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Customer Care: What Does It Really Cost You?

NoTouch

One of my old mentors in big box retail liked to say to us “retail is easy: you’re selling stuff to people!” As far as he was concerned, anything and everything from operations to merchandising needed to address that core principle, otherwise it just got in the way.

Yet retailers often forget that.

The worst thing you can say to a customer is “I’m sorry, that’s our policy.”

Less than 5% of customers are “problem customers” who either steal, swindle or abuse return policies (“renters” as we used to call them), yet often retailers create policies intended to foil that 5% while alienating the 95% of customers that they want to keep.

When you’ve got an actual bad customer, you’ll know it. The other 95% of the time take the long view and err on the side of generosity.

Not long ago one of my dealers refused a simple warranty return for a customer, who then contacted us directly.

Following up and coaching the dealer I asked them “Are you really going to sour your relationship with a paying customer over a twenty five dollar pair of earphones?” They admitted that no, they’d rather not do that.

A little creativity and goodwill will take you a long way in building lasting relationships with your clients.

Oftentimes, polices that retailers think are a good idea are in fact bad ones.

A few years ago, on a trip to Victoria BC my wife and I stopped in at a little boutique in the Inner Harbour whose name escapes me but it was a toy store with a year-round Christmas theme: mid-summer and there were Christmas decorations everywhere!

Since both of us are absolutely bonkers about Christmas, of course we had to check it out!

Years in retail left me really hard to impress when it comes to merchandising, but this store was beautiful.

Too beautiful, in fact.

All over the store mixed in with every single display were little 5×7 hand-written note cards with exquisite penmanship forbidding and admonishing against touching anything, and with a snotty tone to boot: “don’t touch the displays;” “please keep your children off of the rocking horses;” “absolutely do not touch or fold the tags on the Beanie Babies.”

You get the picture.

Never mind that I wasn’t inclined to do any of the above in the first place, the pre-emptive scolding pissed me off.

I get that the proprietors take pains to make their store a work of art, but honestly, if you don’t want anyone to touch anything ever, open up a toy museum and put everything behind glass.

Instead of the workout I anticipated my Amex getting while I followed my wife around the store, we spent nothing.

The customers pay the bills. Make sure that you have a lot of them, and that you keep them happy.

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