Is stripping your service department of all authority really worth it? Are you crippling their ability to best serve the customer because they aren’t empowered to make judgement calls or service decisions? Let’s dive into why it’s a good idea to rethink this strategy and ensure your team members can always do what is best for the team.
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Is stripping your service department of all authority really worth it? Are you crippling their ability to best serve the customer because they aren’t empowered to make judgement calls or service decisions? Let’s dive into why it’s a good idea to rethink this strategy and ensure your team members can always do what is best for the team.
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
What, if you could empower your employees while also saving time and money that, and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast. Hey, Justin, here. Welcome to episode two of the marketing and service.com podcast. Today. I want to talk about creating an empowered service culture. And before I jump into that, I just want to spell out a scenario that I know that many of you have seen before. Picture yourself in line at the grocery store on a busy day. It's a long line you've already, we've been waiting for quite some time. And the person in front of you has a price discrepancy. The box of macaroni and cheese. The person in front of you is trying to ring out, was supposed to only be on sale for 99 cents. But instead they were charged a dollar 99 and they would like that$1 back, the cashier promptly leans over, pulls the switch that flashes the light on their station, waiting for a manager to come over the manager after finishing another task with another cashier comes and asks what the issue is. And they're told that there's a price discrepancy. The manager then calls over the loudspeaker for a price check on macaroni and cheese aisle to what seems like an hour later, someone comes from the back and confirms that yes, indeed. There was a tag that said that that macaroni and cheese should have been on sale. In the meantime, the line has been piling up and probably three to five minutes have elapsed to try to resolve this issue. And now you have an entire line of angry customers. Now I know you've seen this before, and if it wasn't at the grocery store, you've seen it happen somewhere else. It takes everything to avoid the temptation, to just open your wallet and say, excuse me, I'll give you a dollar. If you just leave it. Now, this is going to lead me into how you can empower your employees in a way that you can save time and money. And even more importantly, make your customers happier when they leave and create an amazing experience for them. The first time I heard about empowering employees was not from a college textbook and it wasn't from a fancy marketing job. First time I encountered employee empowerment was one of my first jobs. I was, I think it was my third or fourth job and I was 17 or 18 at Sears. I don't know if they still do this today, but a long time ago, they would train you by empowering you to make choices that could help a customer and reduce the reliance on managers. A perfect example is if someone came in with a broken screwdriver, you did not need the manager's approval to exchange it. Craftsman screwdrivers at the time had a lifetime warranty. And if there were any issues, they would get exchanged. No questions asked if someone had a price issue with an ad or a coupon. Again, you had a certain level of discretion to help that customer to the best of your ability. At the time, I didn't realize or appreciate what an amazing and powerful tool this is. And it shocks me today to see that most companies have never adopted or embraced any type of similar policies. So the first question that comes up is why, why do you want to empower your employees? The bottom line is that every touch point with a customer is a marketing opportunity. If you could put progress meters on each customer, you would put them for trust of you, trust of your company and trust of the products that you are selling. And with each engagement, you only have one of two options to move that needle up or to move it down. You could probably just let it stay static in the middle, but that's not very exciting and will likely not lead to longterm relationships. So think about when a customer has an issue, they really want it resolved quickly and efficiently with as less time wasted as possible. You know, it's interesting when you talk about online sales, you always hear about the frictionless experience and that means that you want the fewest number of clicks possible. You want the process from adding something to the cart, to checking out, to be the easiest thing in the world. Companies will spend millions of dollars to try to redesign websites, to eliminate one or two clicks, to help a customer checkout faster and easier yet in the real world, we don't seem to do that same process. You don't hear about a frictionless in-person shopping experience and you certainly don't see companies spending millions of dollars, trying to figure out how a cashier can help a customer more efficiently. The reason we want this frictionless in-store experience is simple. We can resolve issues quickly. If there's less friction, that means there's less time-wasting every minute that you have three employees tied up to price, check a$1 difference. You are losing money. I don't care what you're selling. I don't care what your business is. And I don't care what your profit margin is. There is no way that taking three employees times for three to five minutes, when you have a long line of customers, you're trying to collect money from is a good idea. So now let's give another scenario. We'll go back to the grocery store that we were talking about before, but this is going to be a frictionless in store shopping experience with an empowered employee. In this case, the cashier in the same example, it's a busy day. There's a long line. And the person in front of you begins to complain that their macaroni and cheese was supposed to be a dollar less without any hesitation. The cashier overrides the price on the register provides the$1 discount the customer is expecting and moves on. The entire issue was resolved in five to 10 seconds. There is no holdup. The customers behind that customer are not going to be angry or upset anymore. And you have now just created a frictionless experience that doesn't embarrass that customer doesn't cause a huge bottleneck in your staffing and allows them to move quickly and efficiently onto the next customer. Naturally, the next question that's going to come in is how do you do this? What does it look like from a policy perspective or a realistic scenario? When working with employees, you might just have one employee. You might have three or four. This may not even be relevant to you because you don't have a store and you don't have in-person sales. But typically what this looks like is not a hard policy where you're going to have employees giving away everything in your store. Every single day, you can create limits and you can create boundaries, any great policies that enable the employee to be empowered and make these quick decisions without fear of repercussion. But you can also make sure that this is not taken advantage of. Now. I can't give you the exact answers to this policy because of course it would depend on what you're selling, the average value of the sale, the dollar amount of the discrepancy, the overall cost it takes for every hour. Employees are bickering over how to do a price correction with all these variables. What I can do is give you a few guidelines that I think will be helpful in establishing a policy. So one thing is to simply have a dollar limit. This dollar limit can be both from a transactional standpoint and it can also be as a daily or weekly standpoint. And what I mean by that is you could tell in a cashier that if there is any discrepancy that is less than$1 simply err, on the side of the customer and move on. However, if this is a cashier that is ringing up hundreds of people a day over the course of a week, and they did that with every single customer, then potentially you would have thousands of dollars that just went missing. So perhaps what you could do, because this is not something that comes up every second of every day, give a$1 limit, but also give a weekly budget and chalk it up as a marketing expense. So perhaps in the grocery store scenario, that employee is empowered to make financial decisions within$1, but no more than$10 a week, that would allow them at their discretion two times a day to move someone quickly through the line. The other keyword here is discretion. You should educate your employees to the best of your ability to recognize someone who may be taking advantage of or asking for something that's too much. If someone has a coupon that expired the day before, and it was for 10 cents, then you might want to do the favor and apply that 10 cents off the purchase price of that item. If it's an unreasonable request where the coupon had expired, I don't know, let's say six months ago, then that's a whole different scenario and employees should feel comfortable, declining to appease the customer. Or at that point, if necessary escalated to a manager, another potential consideration would be time limits establishing how much time may be saved by an employee being empowered to expedite a certain customer service inquiry, something like a price check, especially at a large big box store can take a very long time. Someone has to find the person first, that person has to find the aisle and hopefully find the product. Then usually walk it back to the front of the store. And this is just a nightmare. Again, depending on the dollar value that the discrepancy is over, uh, it may be worth it to just go ahead and approve something, maybe$2 or$3 in these instances on a larger scale, depending on what your product or services, perhaps you're selling a service, that's worth tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. And you have a discrepancy over a hundred dollars while a hundred dollars is a far greater amount than a dollar in the scheme. And of the context of that sale, really nothing should change that sales person should be empowered to have that a hundred dollar leniency. If that's going to be the, make it or break it of keeping a customer happy again, chalking that up as a marketing expense, you've spent all this time and money and energy to acquire a new customer. Customer acquisition is always the most expensive part of most marketing programs take advantage of the customers that you have by treating them right, because servicing existing customers costs far less than acquiring new customers. Even when you add in these additional expenses for empowering your employees, another option could be product limits. Perhaps there's a range of products that you want to have some lenience with, perhaps their high traffic items that many people buy or they're high profit items, where if we're taking 50 cents or a dollar off, it's really not going to change much. But just another idea to think about, uh, you could maybe exclude an entire section of product that might be a high theft item or a class of product that is more likely to have someone attempt to haggle or negotiate the price down for one reason or another. You could also consider this as a traffic policy. Perhaps you maintain the existing policy. If there is no one else in the line and it'll take several minutes and businesses slow, maybe the person who's going to do the price check has nothing else to do anyway. So it doesn't hurt. You know, you, you are now, uh, certainly creating friction for that customer, but depending on your business, depending on your margins, depending on your traffic flow, that may or may not be an option that you would want to consider. Obviously if it's a busy day, move people through as quickly as possible and don't hold up the lines. Now part of this framework would also be, uh, some type of monitoring and reporting because you do need to know when this happens, there should be a policy that supports employees providing feedback to management on these actions. So if an employee gives the$1 discount, they would have to put a little note on the sale, whether it's in the point of sale or whether they have a little book with their budget, uh, but something that would document why they did it or what happened or what the reason was. And again, this could be a time consuming process. And maybe in that 50 cent discrepancy at a grocery store, this is not so important, but you want to be able to monitor these price changes and honoring of customer requests. And you want to make sure that it's actually resulting in your marketing goals, which is to move the needle up and make you a more trustworthy company and make that salesperson more trustworthy to the customer and for someone who is going to enjoy the products of your business. So hopefully you find this information educational and can apply it to your business. I know that this is kind of a specific process that may not be to a small business. You may not have a service department. You may not have cashiers, but I want you to think about how this relates overall, uh, in creating that empowered service culture, doesn't have to be the cashier at a retail counter. There's so many aspects of businesses, both that sell product and that sell services where you have sales staff, you have support teams, maybe you have engineering teams, production teams, uh, and even in these larger businesses, you have to really think about how can you create empowered employees and you can't overlook the benefits that are also given to the employee. Most employees want more responsibility and they want the opportunity to be able to resolve issues on their own without having to run to someone by empowering them. Not only are you improving the service for your customers, you're also improving the culture of your company, employees that are trusted to make these types of decisions will have more loyalty to their company and feel that they are more valued than in companies where they're not empowered and they can't make any decisions without oversight. I'd love to hear from some of you with small businesses on how you've worked to empower your employees or the concerns or fears that you would have in doing so you can always hit me up@justinatmarketingandservice.com. And of course you can check out our marketing and service.com Facebook group. I also have an extended version of the content that we discussed here today on the marketing and service.com blog. And I would love if you check that out and made some comments there, you know, it's funny because internal policies like this are not generally viewed as part of a marketing department. And again, my whole goal of this podcast is to really combine marketing and service together because I do think there is a tremendous amount of overlap. I do believe that with every touch point you have with the customer, you should be moving that needle forward to increase trust for you, your products and your business, and the better you do that, the more you will be rewarded with repeat business and loyal customers who value their relationship with you as always. I hope you find this content helpful, and I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2:Have a great day.[inaudible].