You can’t serve me the way I want to be served

You can’t serve me the way I want to be served.

Customer experiences are a lost art, and the passion behind them has been destroyed by cost-cutting and bad decisions over the last three decades. And much of what we do today is based on assumptions, not facts. The easy answer from many is to throw more people on retail floors and meet every customer request in each interaction, which will magically build sales. If only it were that easy, but it isn’t. While it is true that customers want excellent service, the challenge is that most retailers can’t personalize customer experiences because they don’t know each customer well enough.  Even with data backing them up, most always generalize what customers want by service and customer experience and miss the target. 

Furthermore, the failure to invest in recruiting and training the right staff significantly diminishes the chances of establishing a genuine connection with customers. Even with staff training, the absence of follow-up and guided practice can lead to losing a great deal of money in a poorly planned initiative. 

But there’s more to this. No two customers can be satisfied with the same service prescription. Everyone is driven by different emotional points that even your best-trained staff won’t be able to spot. But let’s be clear: there is a difference between serving a customer’s needs and serving with the intent to create a customer experience. The first is a pragmatic approach, and the latter is idealistic. Pragmatism closes a sale, and idealism ties employees down to trying to be all things to one customer.  “You can’t serve me the way I want to be served” because most customers are on a mission when shopping; it’s unrealistic to expect them to spend two hours in a store to get to know them and build a relationship. There are only a handful of retail environments where this much time is spent in any environment.  If it does happen, it is because of the nature of the retailer’s product and service. 

Most consumers can barely spare the time for grocery shopping, let alone hanging around other retailers for two hours. In this day and age of daylight thefts, many retail associates would get nervous with customers hanging around that long and even be tempted to call security. 

The reality of retailing is that a pragmatic sales and service approach created for your brand with some signature tweaks is the most effective way to serve and close sales. After all, if you can’t close sales, how do you pay for the service? Whatever you do, don’t follow the herd chasing all these ideas that have never been tested or belong to another brand. It’s bad advice you’re getting. 

It’s important to ground these basics into your business today. As AI becomes more pervasive and the growth of Personal AI assistants evolves faster over the next couple of years, the challenge of creating personalized service experiences that can serve customers the way they want will change the game dramatically. The time to prepare for it is now.

Pragmatic Sales and Service Practices mean you will train your staff to identify why customers come into your stores and their needs. Further, train your staff to be solutions-oriented by digging deeper and learning more about their fashion and/or functional preferences. When a customer enters your store, it’s because you have something they need. Your service experience should be consistent with what you and your staff can deliver without too much fanfare. Trying to copy a different brand is a recipe for failure.

I am a retailer. I have worked in stores, served customers at a bar, served tables, washed floors, and scrubbed toilets. I’ve owned personnel agencies and fast food outlets. I then joined the corporate world as an area manager, business development director, VP of operations, country manager, and CEO, all within two global companies. I have been responsible for 11 brands between these two companies. Retailing is my life, and it has served me well in taking on other roles. Today, I am also the chairman of a utility company; I’ve hired CEOs and appointed incredibly smart board directors. My day job is helping private equity firms, startups, and companies looking to expand in other countries.  I deal with politicians and write a great deal about business, the economy, society, and the environment. I have lived and worked in these countries: the US, Canada, and China, with assignments in Europe and Australia.

I have two philosophies:

1. We should fear mediocrity more than we fear failure.
2. Dismiss Nothing, Expect the Unexpected, Plan for the Improbable

George Minakakis is the CEO of Inception Retail Group and the Author of the soon-to-be-released book “Predictive Leadership: How Humans and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Organizations, Innovation, and Competition.”