Customer Service

I was in Coolangatta yesterday and called a taxi to get back to the airport. Just before the taxi arrived I received a text message telling me it was close by and giving me the taxi number.  I had the same experience a couple of weeks ago when on the Gold Coast. The image shows both texts I received.

This is excellent customer service from the taxi companies. In each case they didn’t even ask for my number. It shows them as being attentive. Oh, and they have not sent texts after the trip, no spam.

These text messages are an excellent use of technology.  We do a similar thing with magazine putaways and have done for many years – customers love it.  We also do it with special orders. In fact, I’d jump at any chance to provide feedback or an update to a customer by text or email or some other tech based service.

The taxi experience is particularly wonderful given that they can be notoriously late or not even show. The text message gives you certainty. I love it.

The experience yesterday was a reminder of the importance of connecting with our customers.

Touch Networks asked newsagents how they would like suppliers to communicate with them. The survey results make interesting reading. Click here to see the survey results in full – I provide the link with permission from Touch.

The results show that newsagents prefer to receive information via email, website, social media and industry magazine in that order. none want to receive information from suppliers via a phone call. Suppliers note!

One trend I have noticed recently is a supplier emailing and then calling a few minutes later to see if I got the email.

This research from Touch Networks is terrific. It’s part of their focus on further improving their own communication with newsagents. They offer a good suite of mobile phone recharge products, phonecard products and other items we can easily sell in our newsagencies.

At a Woolworths supermarket a couple of days ago, after the required questions of: How’s your day been? and Got much on tonight? the checkout person handed me a new Freddo biscuit product from Cadbury. Here she said and continued scanning my purchases.  I’m sposed (SIC) to give everyone one she then said with a sigh – it sounded like an excuse. I dunno why she continued, rolling her eyes and shrugging her shoulders.

I hope Cadbury is not paying Woolworths to hand out these sample packs. If their goal was to get them in the hands of shoppers to sample the product I guess it worked … but you’d want it done with some professionalism and grace, you;d want it to be respectful of the brand.

If their goal was to make us feel good about the gift or to be given it with any context, it failed.

Through her execution of the promotion this checkout person told me she didn’t like her job, would do the bare minimum required and even undermine attempts by her employer to grow sales.

The experience was out of synch with the current Woolworths TV commercials promoting friendly service. It was also our of synch with the promotions run on their in-store radio.

The whole experience was a reminder of how much we rely on our employees to pitch our message and meet our customer service objective. It left me wondering if there was something this employees supervisor, manager or some other person could do to have her better reflect the customer service experience Woolworths advertises I will get.

Oh, yes, the Freddo biscuit was a treat.

Click here to download the newsagency customer service survey results.  The results provide a good insight into the customer service issues newsagents face.

48.6% receive complaints rarely, 27.1% a few times a month and 20.0% a few times a week.

53.0% of complaints are product related outside the control of the newsagent and 33.3% are service related outside the control of the newsagent.

55.7% of newsagents have a complaint handling process in place.

I hope that these results are of use to other newsagents. I certainly find them useful – particularly as a reminder to have a clear process in place for handling complaints and recording feedback to go to those who can improve the situation.

After all, customer service is our most important point of difference.

I am grateful to the 75 newsagents who took part in the survey.

Given the comments here over the last couple of days about the story run on A Current Affair about the customer complaint to a Queensland newsagent, I have a quick survey on customer complaints. Click here to participate. I’ll publish the results next week.

Langham hotels demonstrate the value of a consistent service offering under a common shingle. Whether it’s at the Langham in Southbank in Victoria, the Langham in Auckland or one of the other Langham hotels, the experience is consistently excellent. It is this consistent service that brings me back. Each time I am surprised at an extra service or extra step to help me enjoy and remember my stay.

On Saturday night I stayed at the Langham in Melbourne after our Christmas party. When I collected my car in the morning they had left this free bottle of water for the road.  Talk about exceptional service.  Brilliant.

I love how an organisation the size of the Langham hotel group has been able to systemise providing exceptional service yet doing this in such a way that it feels personal, like they do value you as a customer. It makes me confident that no matter which Langham I visit I will have a consistently good experience.

This is the challenge of the newsagency shingle and the reason more and more newsagents will break away from this and trade under a shingle that operates with some discipline.  Major landlords get this and often require newsagents to trade under a shingle that is promoted and has values supporting it.

There is nothing I would love more than the shopper experience in newsagencies to be uniformly exceptional or just good.  We can’t do it because we don’t own the shingle and can’t control what people do under and behind it.

Check out the table at the entrance to a jeweller business I saw in the US recently. Free coffee for anyone who wants one.

Since it’s just inside the lease line there is no grief form the landlord.

It’s a nice touch, giving shoppers a message that this business is thinking abut them. Indeed, it was the only jewellery business, out of four in this mall, with free coffee on offer.

I know newsagents who do this with soup in the winter and iced water in summer. I like the idea and the customer service difference it represents. It’s something corporate stores struggle with getting right.

I received a call yesterday from a newsagency shopper in regional Victoria wanting to complain about service from their local newsagent. The shopper called me thinking I was someone else connected with the brand the business trades under. I have no connection with the business at all.  But the customer and I talked.

The newsagents, a husband and wife team, provide poor customer service according to the caller – swearing at customers, refusing to hold a newspaper for collection later in the day and opening at different times in the day.

My caller, a long term newsagency shopper in their eighties, wanted to know what could be done. I explained that this was a locally owned independent business. Don’t you care about how they make you look I was asked. Of course I said. So call them and tell them to improve their service. I though this was a fair enough response but declined. It’s not my place to call a newsagent I have never spoken with and have no connection with to ask them to lift their game.

I gave the called the details of the people behind the brand so they could at least get the service complaint to someone commercially connected with the business.

Talking with the caller some more it turns out that they want the problems fixed so they don’t have to our newspapers, magazines and cards from the local supermarket – one of the big two. I was please to hear this yet sad to hear of such poor service from a newsagent.

While I appreciate that there are often two sides to a story, my caller sounded genuine.

We all in this channel have an obligation to each other.

A young girl was in the shop yesterday asking if she could buy one of the posters we had promoting the TV Week One Direction competition. I let her take it for free – it cost us nothing and the new issue is out tomorrow.  As she went to re move the poster she called out I love you! I am guessing that the poster was a pretty good get for her. I appreciated her response.

It feels to me that Christmas this year is more about price than even last year.  Every major retailer I visit is pitching price.  Earlier this week in Queensland, Coles posters told me that me they will beat any other retailer in Queensland on a list of items.  Chemist Warehouse says they will beat any retailer who decides to undercut them.  Woolworths says they will price match.

A newsagent mentioned to me yesterday that their local Officeworks is price matching the newsagent on ink and toner given that the newsagent was setting the price benchmark in town for this category.

Where does this leave us?  Looking expensive some would say.

The one area where we can win is customer service for try as they might, no corporate can stray from their head office driven script enough to deliver the kind of personal and memorable customer service we are capable of.

They key for newsagents in a price focused Christmas season is for us to deliver differentiating customer service.