The best retailers recognise that their decisions should be made after gathering and analysing key information rather than making decisions based on intuition or ‘gut feelings’. We are seeing more and more often that feedback can play a vital ongoing role in this process – even with regard to acquiring competitive intelligence.
Although many retailers just pay lip service to customer satisfaction, others employ real service efforts. ‘Lip service retailers’ publicly state that customer service is important but do not empower employees, or they believe that customer service is going well so long as there are no complaints, or they refuse to fund service guarantee programs based on cost considerations. In contrast, real service is based on having high customer long-term loyalty based on delighting customers.
One way of distinguishing between the two is to see how far a retailer would go for its customers. Would it go as far as reporters and other employees at the Boston Globe recently did? After hearing repeated subscriber complaints about ‘widespread delivery problems’, the Boston Globe management asked for volunteers in the newsroom to deliver the Sunday paper. The response was positively overwhelming. Editors, reporters, Web producers, and employees in marketing and advertising arrived at the newspaper’s three distribution centres, stacked the Sunday edition in their cars, and fanned out across the city to deliver the papers. One reporter said, “It was pretty incredible that so many people were willing to give up their sleep because we care so much about our readers”.
There are other stories of retail employees going beyond customer expectations to delight customers. In one incident, a Nordstrom tailor did alterations on a garment not purchased at Nordstrom so a bridesmaid’s dress would properly fit. In another instance, a bellhop at a Ritz Carlton drove to the airport to meet up with a guest who left some valuables behind in a hotel room. How far would your retailers go to satisfy customers after receiving feedback from them?