Just Because You Can Doesn’t mean you should Pt 2
Remember Customer Service means Serving the Customer!
Number one characteristic of successful small business owners is a positive attitude. You need to be a half-glass-full person even though it is hard some days. If you’re not positive, it is not good for business. If you are stressed what ever you do – don’t take it out on your customers.
Recently as a response to the frustration of an increase in online sales and a decrease in retail sales retailers were considering charging a try on fee. In another situation a genuine book buyer was shooed out of a shop for writing down book titles.
If you want to lose customers – that’s a great way to start.
When the going gets tough, the tough have to get going. Internet sales is not new competition. How long have we been buying over the Internet?
You don’t just curl up and die – you take on their competition. First of all, not everyone shops online some people find value in shopping in stores. Why isn’t there a campaign about coming into a store and buying in store. Why isn’t there a message about customer service and the experience that a retailer can provide you?
This is a story that happened recently. I bought a mower. I bought a mower at a very cheap hardware where you can also get sausages. As you know, when something is cheap, when the service isn’t that flash, when you don’t have experts telling you the things you need to know about mowers a couple of things can go wrong and it did. I ended up having to take the mower to get repaired at a specialist mower shop. I was asked where I bought it and he remarked “the sales assistant didn’t tell you which way to lift the mower when you’re cleaning it, did they?” Yes we had the oil and water mixed because we had lifted the mower “the wrong way”. So my cheaply priced mower just cost me repairs. If I’d bought it from the place with customer service I wouldn’t have had to pay for those repairs! Now that is the value a sales assistant with expertise in retail can provide.
This is the story and conversation that needs to be had with customers.
It’s like in the panic of a downturn businesses have forgotten their value and they are not communicating to customers why they should shop with them. My mower man did. I’m now looking at buying a chainsaw with them.
