Customer Service In Stores

[Hammock Rider]

   I hate to sound so negative about it but I've come to the conclusion that to more and more businesses the customers are of little importance. It's revenue that they want. Every company that I've worked for, no matter how great a job they did at taking care of the customer when I started there, eventually decided that the best business practice was to give the customer as little as possible while taking as much of their money as possible.

  Yes it seems that treating a customer well, giving them what they want, would insure a successful business. I guess successful isn't enough for many companies now. They want massive continued growth to a degree that seems unsustainable to me. My current company has cut so much staff that it can't help but effect the customer. It's not jsut cuts in customer service personell that hurt the customer, but cuts in engineering, billing,  etc. mean the customer is going to get slower and sometimes incomplete service.

  When I started working at Borders Books they were dedicated to being good book sellers. Selling books, as well as music and later movies was what they did, and they did it well. Everyone who worked there was a book person, music person, film buff etc. Then the stock spilt and the upper management went crazy. Everything became about chasing the market. Hours were cut, staff was cut and Borders starting hiring more and more management from outside the company. They hired managers who weren't book people but Big Box people. Borders wanted to become the #1 Big Box seller of books.  But they didn't care that they were selling books, They could have been selling anything, automobile air-freshners for all the higher-ups cared. They just wanted that stock to go up.  They gave up on what made them successful and just chased Wall Street. And look what that got them.

   Believe me I understand how important it is to have a growing company with rising stock value. but that should happen as a result of having a good company, of delivering a good product or service.  But delivering a good product or service can be expensive though, It's easier and cheaper to persuade people that they are getting a good product though advertising etc,. that it is to acutally deliver that product, or service.

  I'm sure this comes off as a major rant but it's something that has bothered me for years.

[Flick James]

   I hate to sound so negative about it but I've come to the conclusion that to more and more businesses the customers are of little importance. It's revenue that they want. Every company that I've worked for, no matter how great a job they did at taking care of the customer when I started there, eventually decided that the best business practice was to give the customer as little as possible while taking as much of their money as possible.

  Yes it seems that treating a customer well, giving them what they want, would insure a successful business. I guess successful isn't enough for many companies now. They want massive continued growth to a degree that seems unsustainable to me. My current company has cut so much staff that it can't help but effect the customer. It's not jsut cuts in customer service personell that hurt the customer, but cuts in engineering, billing,  etc. mean the customer is going to get slower and sometimes incomplete service.

  When I started working at Borders Books they were dedicated to being good book sellers. Selling books, as well as music and later movies was what they did, and they did it well. Everyone who worked there was a book person, music person, film buff etc. Then the stock spilt and the upper management went crazy. Everything became about chasing the market. Hours were cut, staff was cut and Borders starting hiring more and more management from outside the company. They hired managers who weren't book people but Big Box people. Borders wanted to become the #1 Big Box seller of books.  But they didn't care that they were selling books, They could have been selling anything, automobile air-freshners for all the higher-ups cared. They just wanted that stock to go up.  They gave up on what made them successful and just chased Wall Street. And look what that got them.

   Believe me I understand how important it is to have a growing company with rising stock value. but that should happen as a result of having a good company, of delivering a good product or service.  But delivering a good product or service can be expensive though, It's easier and cheaper to persuade people that they are getting a good product though advertising etc,. that it is to acutally deliver that product, or service.

  I'm sure this comes off as a major rant but it's something that has bothered me for years.

It's a good rant, HR, and it's true. The same thing happened at Guitar Center. I worked there for three years, right about the time the company went public. From the time I started, I witnessed an almost systematic degradation in customer service focus. It seems that once a company goes public, things begin to slide. I worked for GoDaddy.com, a great company to work for, and it's founder Bob Parsons, has flirted with going public a couple of times, and came very close at one point, before deciding against it. He was concerned about the same thing. The company is his baby and his legacy, and he treats it, and his employees, like gold. The customers get the positive residual effects of this. I'm sure there have been people who have had bad experiences with them, but overall the service is just outstanding.

The problem with public corporations is that the stockholders must be appeased no matter what. And so CEO's are under enormous pressure to keep stock value going up. And so, once the stock starts to flatline, they have to start cutting quality for the sake of profit to keep that line going up. Eventually, once that's exhausted, and the value of the product or service that once made the company great has been depleted of all it's worth, some start resorting to nefarious means inflate that stock until it collapses, and you end up with Enron and WorldCom. Another part of the problem is that these executives have enormous stock incentives as part of their compensation, and so they stand to gain by artificially pumping up that stock value.

I'm digressing a bit, but this system is a big part of what creates this gap in customer service of which you speak.

[AndyC]

Much as I was saying in another thread about what is killing popular music. It seems there's a threshold a company - or even a whole industry - crosses, where it becomes so profitable, it becomes all about the profit. Once they get a taste, they want more, and generic business people start buying in because they smell a profit. To them, it's just another business, and they'll take their one-size-fits-all approach to it. And if it goes public, suddenly the company's concern is pleasing people who are even more detached, who buy and sell shares based not on liking the company or having any desire to be part of it, but on one fluctuating number. The company goes from being owned by somebody with an interest in it, to being part of a larger corporate entity, to being one of many assets in the portfolios of a whole bunch of faceless investors who might not even know or care exactly what they own a piece of.

And I've never understood the bizarre notion in big companies that being profitable is not enough. You have to meet some arbitrary level of profitability, even if it means cutting staff or reducing service to your customers. To me, if you bring in enough money to pay your bills, your employees and yourself, and have some left, you're doing fine. There's certainly no reason to take drastic steps to correct a supposed problem.

I also find that when a company becomes sufficiently large, it starts to operate in its own reality, pulling crap on its customers no small business would get away with.

[Killer Bees]

I'll agree with you for the most part, KB, although I'm Gen X according to my birthdate.

However, I hate retail. Worked it for three years and, while a job is a job, I will never go back unless I absolutely had to.

I'm a fan of the the show Dirty Jobs, and the host, Mike Rowe, was being interviewed by Adam Carolla and they were talking about how nobody wants to get dirty anymore. People look at the dirty jobs as beneath them. Personally, I would find far more honor and satisfaction from some of the jobs on that show (worm castings rancher, tar roofer, cheese maker, pig farmer, etc.) than working retail. I worked in construction for a while doing framing, drywalling and finishing and always felt good at the end of the day, like I truly put in an honest day's work, and when you get home at the end of the day you tend to get treated as such.

That's very true.  I worked as a waitress in a small local cafe many years ago.  It was awful low paying work.  But I liked the regular customers and I did my level best to make their dining experience an enjoyable one.  That's why when I get good service I always thank them and tell them how great they've been.  We don't have tipping in this country because the minimum wage isn't too bad, but I believe that praise doesn't always have to be monetary

[Jack]

I agree with what all you guys are saying.  Businesses grow by offering quality products and good customer service.  But once they get to a certain size they forget all about that, assume their customer base is guaranteed, and figure they can do whatever they want to maximize profits.  It seems like the professional managers move in, and they don't plan on making a career out of working for this company - if they can run profits up by a good percentage over a year or two, who cares if they go bankrupt a few years after that?  They'll have moved on to a different company by then.

All these "advanced management techniques" basically boil down to a get rich quick scheme. 

[AndyC]

The other problem is when companies get big enough, there's no longer a connection between bosses and customers. There are just so many customers, so many employees, so many locations, that you end up with this huge hierarchy, where the closer you get to the customer, the less authority the employee has. The people dealing with the customers have no authority, and the people directly above them don't have much more. There is this leadership vacuum where the people who can make decisions, and aren't afraid to make decisions, can't keep track of everybody and everything below them. You end up with the monkeys running the zoo, which can be good or bad for the customer. I mean, if employees have more autonomy, they can better please the customer, or they can really screw up. To fix that, the upper management (who insist on having the same level of control as the boss of a smaller business) don't pay for some decent middle management and delegate authority, they just set a lot of inflexible policies for everything, and expect the monkeys to run the zoo from inside their cages. So, a few bad customer experiences are replaced by a lot of really frustrating customer experiences. But they're frustrating in a consistent way, and in a manner dictated by the control freaks at the top, and that's what matters.

Contrast that to the smaller business, where the manager answers directly to the owner, they know first-hand what's going on, the employees have access to both of them, policies and expectations are communicated directly and in more of a two-way dialogue, not developed by a committee and compiled into a handbook of rigid rules. And when a customer has a problem the employee can't fix, the owner can come out of his office and try to make it right. When a business gets too big for a few people to control, customer service and working conditions will inevitably suffer.

[Killer Bees]

  I hate to sound so negative about it but I've come to the conclusion that to more and more businesses the customers are of little importance. It's revenue that they want. Every company that I've worked for, no matter how great a job they did at taking care of the customer when I started there, eventually decided that the best business practice was to give the customer as little as possible while taking as much of their money as possible.

  Yes it seems that treating a customer well, giving them what they want, would insure a successful business. I guess successful isn't enough for many companies now. They want massive continued growth to a degree that seems unsustainable to me. My current company has cut so much staff that it can't help but effect the customer. It's not jsut cuts in customer service personell that hurt the customer, but cuts in engineering, billing,  etc. mean the customer is going to get slower and sometimes incomplete service.

  When I started working at Borders Books they were dedicated to being good book sellers. Selling books, as well as music and later movies was what they did, and they did it well. Everyone who worked there was a book person, music person, film buff etc. Then the stock spilt and the upper management went crazy. Everything became about chasing the market. Hours were cut, staff was cut and Borders starting hiring more and more management from outside the company. They hired managers who weren't book people but Big Box people. Borders wanted to become the #1 Big Box seller of books.  But they didn't care that they were selling books, They could have been selling anything, automobile air-freshners for all the higher-ups cared. They just wanted that stock to go up.  They gave up on what made them successful and just chased Wall Street. And look what that got them.

   Believe me I understand how important it is to have a growing company with rising stock value. but that should happen as a result of having a good company, of delivering a good product or service.  But delivering a good product or service can be expensive though, It's easier and cheaper to persuade people that they are getting a good product though advertising etc,. that it is to acutally deliver that product, or service.

  I'm sure this comes off as a major rant but it's something that has bothered me for years.

I agree with you, HR.  Borders bookstores here were insanely expensive.  I could get books cheaper from Borders in the US than I could in my own city.  And the prices for DVDs were insane and insulting.  We pay more for everything here anyway but books, DVDs and CDS are just abominable.

When you chase the almighty dollar it ALWAYS backfires.  Hence Borders closing its doors left and right.  I bought a Terry Pratchett hardcover novel for $27 from Borders instead of the $54 they were originally charging.    But $27 is still too pricey for a hardcover book anyway.

There is an Aussie online men's undwerwear store and all the undies are made here in
Australia.  They TV did an interview with the CEO and asked him why he didn't send everything offshore because it's cheaper.  He said he doesn't need a huge salary to survive and he thought it was important to keep manufacturing jobs here in his own country.  Then he went on about how CEOs and higher ups are greedy and they could keep more jobs in this country but they keep chasing the dollar.

I think I fell in love that day lol.   His salary is $200K a year and he said if you can't survive on that kind of money, you need a good kick in the arse.  And he's right.  I could comfortably survive on that kind of money until my last second on this earth.  And that would be a really schmicko kind of life too.

[AndyC]

They never quite think it through, do they. When you send jobs overseas and pay your own employees as little as possible, you erode your own customer base. More people can't afford to buy what you're selling.

Cutting staff and cutting quality work in the short term. Higher prices work in the short term. They aren't sustainable over time. We wouldn't have nearly the ups and downs in the world economy if these idiots would stop chasing a quick buck and take a longer view.