The Secret to Retail Success
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I used to work as a retail manager, and a good one, in fact. I was a manager for EB Games, a video game retail chain that was eventually acquired by its rival, GameStop.
Here’s a little video I made for a contest we had one year to explain why our store was “The Best Game in Town.” My video should have won (the judging was a disaster), but I think it stands as a strong testament to what I wanted to accomplish in that store:
During my time there, I ran the top-ranked store in the entire Midwest region (around 200 stores) for two years in a row, a feat that had never been achieved in the history of the company. During my third year, we slipped to the second-highest ranked store. (We were edged out by the store where the regional manager had his office, so if anyone was going to beat us, it was them!)
What was the secret of my success? I could tell you, but you wouldn’t full appreciate what I was saying because it would seem too simple. So instead, I’ll offer a story that frames the matter nicely.
We had a management meeting one day, and all of the managers from the various stores in the St. Louis region got together to chat. Our district manager, Tom, asked everyone to go around and share one thing they’d learned from being managers and that they’d like to share with three new managers who were joining us.
We went around the circle, and every single manager had the same story to tell: the customer isn’t always right. Granted, they all had different angles, but the message was always the same. Most customers were time-wasters, these managers said, and it was best to avoid contact with them as much as possible. Children were to be particularly avoided, since they never had any money. Their advice was to focus instead on the customers who spent the most money in the store. Those customers, they surmised, made up most of their sales anyway. As these stories were told and advice was imparted, heads were nodding everywhere. This was the conventional wisdom.
When it was my turn, I stood up and cleared my throat nervously. “Well, I have to admit, I have a different philosophy,” I said. “I have built my store around my customers, and I don’t worry about how much they spend as long as they’re shopping with me and not someone else.” I went on to explain how I’d organized weekly tournaments for children to give them a place to hang out on Saturday night, how I’d invite customers to remain in the store and try out new games even if I didn’t think they were going to buy them, and how I was constantly looking for ways to delight customers with even the simplest transactions so they’d come back the next time.
No one was nodding as I spoke, and a few of the people looked mad. I finished talking, sat down, and listened to the next manager going right back to the “only focus on your best customers” mantra. My words, it seems, fell on deaf ears.
It was that day that I learned why my store was doing so much better than everyone else’s, and why I was seeing such enormous success while the rest of them were experiencing such failure. Many of the managers wrote me off as having a good location, but the truth of the matter was that I had three competitors within a mile and was located at the end of a strip mall. It wasn’t just location that made me successful.
It was the fact that I was willing to be slightly better than the average in the way I treated my customers.
My store wasn’t perfect, and we certainly had our issues with customer service from time to time. But I instilled a culture of treating every customer as a valued asset into my staff, and I enforced it by constantly modeling the behavior myself. It didn’t take long to get customers who would tell us that they’d drive the extra distance to get to our store, or that they’d stopped shopping elsewhere because they appreciated the way we’d handled them when they’d come in on a previous visit.
And those kids who I welcomed into the store every Saturday night? They didn’t spend much. But when birthdays or holidays would roll around, their parents sure did. Some of those kids became valuable sources of referral. Others became great customers in their own right when they got teenage jobs, and a few of them even had the chance to work for me.
Retail customers don’t ask for a lot. Most simply want to be left alone initially so they can browse, and then immediately helped when they have a question or are ready to make a purchase. They don’t mind conversation, and they appreciate frankness. They hate being told that they can’t be helped, especially when it’s because of some arbitrary policy. They also hate feeling like they’re not important because they have not yet made friends with the staff.
As it happens, most retail operations don’t do a good job of even meeting these minimal standards. So, if you can make your store simply meet their expectations, you can be successful.
That’s all it takes, folks.
As for my own store, as soon as I left and another manager took over, its sales dropped. From what I’ve been told, it’s considered an underperforming store now. I run into old customers every now and then, and they tell me that the spirit of the place left with me, and that it’s not the same experience that it used to be. The manager who took over decided to embrace the conventional wisdom and put a stop to all of the things I’d done to build the place up. She was more interested in the status quo than in success.
What are your thoughts? Am I oversimplifying things… or is being better than average really all it takes in the service industry? Post your comments below!
