Wake-Up Call for Big Retailers
Jul 19, 2011
Faced with the grim reality that fewer and fewer people are actually walking through their doors, many of America’s biggest retailers are now busy ordering up all kinds of surveys. The surveys are supposed to reveal what’s behind this trend.
I can save them some time: National retailers need to wake up and actually serve their customers.
If you’ve been out shopping recently, you already know that most national chains are complacent, completely disengaged from the communities where they do business, and delusional enough to believe they can get away indefinitely with service that sucks.
They can’t. Even when you are a big business, you have to act like a small business, especially at a time when people are deciding that it’s a hell of a lot easier, cheaper, and more enjoyable to order stuff online. National chains have to do a better job of engaging with customers one-on-one, deliver a better service experience, and become part of the fabric of the local community. Specifically:
Managers need to be shaking hands, kissing babies and thanking people personally for their business. Any successful local business owner can attest to the importance of this stuff, but hardly any national retail managers bother.
Everyone in the store has to have the kind of personality that attracts customers. A smile is great. An engaging personality better.
You have to keep the place cleaner than you would keep your own home. If Mom sees a filthy bathroom, guess what? Not only is she not coming back, she’s going to tell everyone how bad her experience was.
Working with our clients, we identify the problems, address the issues, change what is happening on the ground, and transform consumer perceptions. We help make these (national) brands reap big rewards in their local markets. It’s business 1001.
Acting like a small business can make you a big winner.
Sure the lack of service is part of the reason. Too many choices might be another.
And lets not forget about no raises for workers (if they are lucky enough to have a job)
and massive price hikes on every product. I think businesses forgot that when they out sourced workers jobs, fired them, or cut their pay that would eventually mean they didn’t have any money to by the things the company was selling.
I concur on the service part but I also want to add that these retailers need to do a MUCH better job at targeting and servicing the fastest growing demographics such as the Hispanic and Asian consumers. While other groups are representing sub-zero growth, these ethnic groups are in many cases, the only consumers producing any kind of growth for retailers.
The sooner these companies and their agencies wake up to smell the coffee, the better positioned they will be in the future to capitalize on America’s New Mainstream Consumer. This is no longer a consumer segment that is a ‘nice to have’ but more so a segment that is a ‘need to have’ in order for these retailers to survive. The numbers don’t lie!
‘Managers need to be shaking hands, kissing babies and thanking people personally for their business. ” I haven’t heard that term used in a long time. So true though, big or small business’s need to keep that intimate feeling with prospective or returning customers .
How about we just ditch big companies “pretending to be small businesses” and just support REAL small businesses?