simplerich

This is part 2 in my short series of posts revolving around my job change. They’re a cross between a farewell letter to my managers and a helpful advice from a lame-duck district manager. I’m torn between looking forward to the challenge of it, missing the people involved with my old job, and obviously the income change will take some getting used to. When you go from being over 11 stores to being over 1 there’s a definite change in disposable income! This post will be about the priorities of a manager. My last post was a bit rambling, but was supposed to be about the manager needing to advocate for their store. My hope is that these posts give me a sense of closure to a job/position I’ve held for 10 years that I’m walking away from now.

Priorities.

We pay attention to the things our bosses pay attention to. Sure, the memos from the office and from our boss may talk about things like improved customer service, better cleaning, more consistent branding, and being friendlier, but what do the bosses talk to us about when they come to the store? What does the office send follow up things about? What are they looking at? What gets us in trouble? What are we accountable for?

If they talk about the customer service part of things only at employee meetings, but then the rest of the time we talk to them harp on us that our paperwork isn’t legible or how many widgets a week are we cranking out then we have to assume that customer service is something we talk about, but widget cranking is the important bit. If we get in more trouble for forgetting to fax a piece of paper whose information is already available on the computer somewhere else than we get into if we’re rude to a customer then it’s obvious where priorities are. They’re on the paper.

If the District Manager calls and expects the person answering the phone to drop everything, including the customer they’re waiting on to help them with whatever special project they’re working on that tells the person answering the phone that the customer is second to the DM. That’s the slippery slope we start down as DMs when we get full or ourselves. I tell my employees all the time, please, if you’ve got a customer put the phone down and wait on them. I’ll hold while you help them. I don’t even mind holding! What I mind is if I hear they’re doing both because then they’re doing neither very well. I’m not a fan of multi-tasking.

So, when you’re working the store and 12 boxes of who knows what comes in and you start ignoring customers to get the product checked in and put out you’re doing exactly what you have to do to keep your boss off your back. It says right in the rules & regs or policies & procedures, that we’re not to leave product sitting around un-checked in. The problem with that is… the trainees see that. The Sales Associates see it. Then they assume that their work, their assigned tasks, their widget polishing, or gadget alphabetizing is the same as receiving all those boxes… something that’s more important than the customer. We teach them that by what we do, not what we say. None of us say, “ignore the customer to get your work done,” instead, we do it while saying not to.

I ask that we hit the floor and offer to help customers periodically and get an amazing amount of push-back. It makes me mad to have Sales Associates tell me, “customers don’t want us to talk to them.” ARGH! When the SA’s say that I don’t want them to talk to me! That’s for sure lol. Don’t just stand behind the counter and wait for them to come to us but a lot of people do exactly that, saying, “Well, I’m polishing widgets, or ordering gadgets” so I don’t have time to wait on the customer. And that’s just not true! It’s so frustrating to me to see it. That’s when I go do it and then go back to what I was doing. I try and show, by example, that you can indeed stop doing something to go help customers. Helping customers shouldn’t be an interruption to your ‘real job.’ It should BE the real job!

I can tell you now, after having met with, visited with, and talked about priorities with the new bigger than big shot that priorities need to be customer first. Your new DM is that way too. We’ve been “getting better” for a long time now. It’s time to “get great” at it! Not just at employee meetings, but all the time. It’s what I intend to do in my new job to increase sales. I hope it works immediately. One of the areas we can continue to grow and beat the competition is outstanding customer service. I don’t mean to say that it’s not better today. It is. But better isn’t good enough any more. It really is time to get great. It’s also an area where first impressions are hugely important. If a DM walks in and sees customers on the floor and people checking in product or polishing widgets or whatever, and never talking to the customer they’re not going to know that you JUST got back from making the rounds, offering to help them all, and helping them. They’re going to only see that the customer is being ignored right now, at the moment they turned on the live surveillance cameras or walked in the back door. We have to not just make sure we are providing great customer service, but we actually have to look like it! Not just to the cameras, but to the customers.

When the customer walks in and sees us busy behind the counters and a floor full of people they immediately think we’re too busy to help them. If we all shout the greeting at them without looking up at them and making eye-contact that doesn’t mean anything. Shouting our greeting with offers to help before they’re even in the door all the way may meet the letter of the law in regards to greeting customers but it’s not the intent. It’s not a greeting or welcome that is meant. It’s a pro-forma going-through-the-motions greeting that is as insincere as it sounds, and as someone who’s heard lots of them… There are a LOT of bad sounding greetings out there.

I hear people now clamoring that the product must get checked in, and their store sees hundreds of people a day and how the heck do I expect them to pretend to sincerely greet each and every one of them? The thing is I don’t expect you to pretend to be sincere. I want you to feel it. I can’t make someone like customer service, but if you don’t you shouldn’t be doing it.

There will be the occasional customer you DO have to fake it with. The man with the nervous tick where he ALWAYS coughs into his hand before reaching into his pocket to get his cash. That guy, I have to pretend to like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him at all! He makes me sick, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. But I greet him like I’m happy to see him because he’s my customer and I want him to stay my customer. The lion’s share of the customers, I am glad to see. And I never mind a break from receiving product to talk to customers. It’s a break from the receiving. I’d rather wait on customers than work on receiving product any day of the week. I was a shipping clerk at a warehouse for a year or so. It was so boring I quit. The other end of that, receiving clerk… not my cup of tea at all. I’m in this job for the customers. If you’re not then maybe it’s time for you to consider a different job too.

The Changes: Priorities – 2 of 3 by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.