What Causes Retailers to Overlook Customer Service?
If you are trying to decide which retailer to do business with, investigate the quality of their customer service first. In today's marketplace, companies have frequently shifted their priorities away from serving the customer, and moved totally toward customer acquisition. A retail business will usually have a customer service department, however, the quality of the actual service provided is often quite poor.
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Turnover
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Employee turnover is a main contributing factor to poor customer service. Each time an employee quits, another employee must be hired to perform the job. During the time it takes to find a replacement, fewer employees are available to help customers. Also, it takes time to train a new employee to fill a position. During training, the new employee may not have the required knowledge and experience to provide acceptable customer service. The problem is compounded when the retailer decides not to fill the vacant position, an occurrence that is more common in our current recession. This creates an ongoing situation where fewer employees are available to help customers. The morale among the employees suffers from an increased workload. The dip in job satisfaction and morale, leads to additional turnover. Customers are also exposed to poor service because they are often dealing with unhappy employees. Retailers often look at turnover as a fact of life in business, and do little to prevent it.
Cost
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Providing quality customer service is an added expense in a retail business. Employers often fail to implement the quality training programs that would enable employees to provide adequate customer service. Creating the programs, and implementing the programs, cost additional revenue that some retailers find hard to justify. Also, highly trained, quality employees often require higher compensation. This is particularly true of retail sales. According to Joel Spolsky, of Inc.com, in 2007 Circuit City replaced 3,400 experienced sales people, with untrained and low-paid workers. Circuit City, an electronics retailer, went out of business in January of 2009.
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Competition
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Competition between retail merchants causes many of them to place total focus on new sales, and not on existing customers. The increased competition from online merchants has made new sales more challenging, and has driven prices lower. Many retailers, in an attempt to maintain profit margins, have cut spending in areas that affect customer service. In retail, bonuses are generally paid on upfront sales, and not on customer retention. Consequently, employees compete among themselves for new sales, often at the cost of quality customer service.
Insensitivity
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In large retail stores, and especially retail chains. upper management seldom takes the opportunity to deal with customers. Customers typically have to voice concerns to individuals who cannot make exceptions to policies. Consequently, customer service is generally handled by employees who are incapable of handling customers who have special requests, needs or problems. Upper management becomes insensitive to these problems, because they seldom deal with them. Customers become very frustrated because they cannot seem to find somebody in a position to solve their problems. Retailers make the mistake of assuming that customer service issues are being handled properly by the primary customer service representative.
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References
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