Mine

It’s a truism in the Service Sector – at least among management personnel – that it’s always the nice customers with whom you have to be the most careful. Bad customers, whether absurdly entitled, short-tempered, fault-finding, easily offended, bigoted, smug, condescending, mind-numbingly cheap, exceptionally rude, chronically late for everything, out of touch with current pricing, oblivious to health and safety regulations, unafraid of the law, or simply whacked out of their tiny little minds are not going to alter their behavior not matter what we do, and that includes boycotting our business. In fact, some of these oddballs will actually refuse to do business with any company that does not give them things to complain about. In many cases, it is doubtful if you could actually lose these customers if you tried, and there would be little to worry about if you did. They’re not really the problem…

The real problem are those customers who will arrive without fuss, behave politely, follow any clear signage or instructions, pay the appropriate price for the product or service – and leave, never to return, if treated badly by the customer service personnel. In fact, if your company’s customer service personnel are sufficiently incompetent, or if your company’s customer service policies are sufficiently horrendous, you may be quietly hemorrhaging these customers and never know it until the firm starts to go bankrupt…

Now, I’m not suggesting that the customer service function is easy, or that managing personnel who perform that function isn’t a challenge. The truth is that while inventory loss due to customer actions – shoplifting as well as vandalism – does not approach the losses most businesses experience due to employee theft and damage, those actions are much more exasperating to the front-line personnel who have to clean up the resulting mess, and front-line managers who have to deal with both the horrible customers (and outright thieves) and the corrosive effect they have on the employees. It does not take many episodes of being lied to, cheated, insulted, abused, or grossly inconvenienced before the average person will realize that any given visitor may turn out to be completely monstrous and start treating everyone as a potential criminal…

In many cases the “nice” customers are the counterpart of our “loyal” employees – the people who adhere to company policy, do their best to perform their job duties correctly despite the miserable conditions and insulting salaries, and would never dream of stealing. Treating these people as potential thieves and embezzlers makes no more sense than treating all customers as potential shoplifters and vandals. Where this becomes a critical problem is when a loyal employee is trying to adhere to the company policies and rules (standards to which the company is holding them) but in doing so outrages a customer, either because the customer really is a thief or a scam artist, or because they’re a nice customer who resents this treatment. This can, and frequently does, result in a situation where the employees know that if they deviate from company policy they will be fired, but if they comply with company policy and a customer complains about them (either because they’ve been thwarted from taking criminal actions or because they’re honest people who would never resort to criminal actions – the behavior is generally the same) they will be fired anyway…

Faced with this kind of Catch-22 situation, many employees will attempt to balance the need to conform to absolute, arbitrary rules written by people who may be completely out of touch with the realities of front-line customer service and the need to placate difficult, dishonest, or completely sociopathic customers. However, some employees will become disillusioned, engage in counterproductive work behaviors (from loafing to outright theft), or just quit, resulting in many of the problems described in the previous post. After all, being threatened with termination (or actually being terminated) so that a thieving “customer” can successful steal from the company is completely unjust, and utterly violates the implied social contract between the employee and his or her supervisor…

There have been a number of attempts to change this situation, or at least contain the most damaging parts, to both the employees and the customers who would actually be worth having. But that will bring us to Part Three of the story…

Inventory Issues

You’ve all heard me going on about inventory control issues before (at least the handful of you who are actually reading this blog have, anyway), but over the past few days I’ve discovered some new examples of inventory control mistakes that are so stupid they bear repeating. I’m not implying that inventory control is simple or easy; on the contrary, knowing how much of which products to order how far in advance is never simple, and when you are trying to run a general merchandise store with literally tens of thousands of items for sale, it’s all but impossible to get it exactly right every time.

That doesn’t mean that we as managers shouldn’t try to get it right, however, since any time you fail to have the product that a customer wants to purchase in stock, not only are you in violation of the First and Second Laws of Business (“When somebody comes to you and says, ‘Hello, I would like to give you a lot of money now,’ you say, ‘YES!’” and “Don’t annoy the customer!” respectively), but you have also lost a sale (and whatever margin you might have made on that sale). If you do this too many times, your company WILL fail, no matter how sound it might be in every other respect.

Consider the case of a purchase we needed to make this week: a decorative screen, to hide the part of our basement where the washer and dryer live from the nicer part of the room. I checked a few places online, and Plummer’s had just the thing: a five-panel folding-style screen of just about the right length. The price was a bit higher than I wanted to pay, but the item looked nice and would fill need we had at the moment. The only problem was, Plummer’s didn’t have any in stock. Not in either of their locations in the area. They could order one for us, and have it in five or six days, maybe, but we needed it for the following day. They lost the sale…

In the end, we found a similar product on clearance at the Expo Design Center near our house, at less than half the price Plummer’s wanted, too. It worked out well for us, and for the Expo Design Center, but Plummer’s just saw a large purchase wing its way out the door. Even worse, however, was tonight’s trip to the market to get some toilet bowl cleaner tablets and a package of the special meal replacement bars for diabetics called Glucerna Bars. These can be extremely helpful in getting through the day, particularly if the food available to you is unpalatable or loaded with sugar (in which case a diabetic can’t eat it but also can’t afford not to). I’ve purchased both of these products for years at the supermarket around the corner from us, a part of the Albertson’s chain. Only this time, I was not able to…

When I looked for our brand and style of bowl cleaner, I discovered that this location no longer carries the ones I wanted; only the “blue” variety that my wife can’t stand (and which make me sick to my stomach). This would have annoyed me, but they had also eliminated the entire section of meal-replacement, zero sugar and modified carbohydrate products for diabetics. Now, I know some clown at their corporate office was looking at the store diagram and decided to go with more shelf-feet of bottled water and powdered soup than these very specialized food items; the same clever fellow probably figured that if we had the “blue” cleaning tablets, why did we also need the white ones?

Unfortunately, in doing so he is not only eliminating the products I want to buy; he’s also telling me that my needs are less important to his company than those of the group(s) he imagines will by the replacement products. I didn’t choose to have diabetes anymore than I chose to be nauseated by the blue toilet bowl tablets, but the local Albertson’s has decided that my business is less important to them than somebody else’s. It’s hard not to take that sort of thing personally…

I mention all of this, again, not to criticize the people who made this decision (although it was stupid) or to belittle the people at Plummer’s who decided not to carry the inventory I needed (although it cost them a large sale, and was, ultimately, stupid). I call these things to your attention because sooner or later you are probably going to be faced with similar choices.

Chose wisely…