Click here for a PDF copy of our April 2009 customer newsletter for our newsXpress Forest Hill shop.
We have copies of the newsletter on a stand at the front of our newsagency – for any passer-by to take. This is in addition to advertising flyers promoting ink, books and other deals we also make available customers from the same location.
In another first, Tower Systems launched Software Ideas on Friday, a facility at its website which gives its newsagent users a greater say in the direction of the software and delivers greater transparency over the product development process.
The Software Ideas initiative is as a direct result of several Tower team members reading Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do? The book struck a nerve with the Tower team which was already working on ways to give newsagents more say in development.
While we have always discussed changes with users, parts of the process have been behind closed doors. Now, all users – anyone coming to our website including competitors – will see the change requests and the votes. This transparency and our acting on requests from users will make the Tower software the most valuable software for newsagents. It is the only software where users have a self-managed, transparent, democratic role in determining the direction of the software.
Click here to see the press release being sent out today launching the Software Ideas facility.
The power to the Tower Systems Head Office and several blocks around was knocked out just before 9:30 this morning. While it is back on now (10:15), we were able to keep our 1,500 newsagent customers informed of alternative support access points through various information channels including this blog. Since we take between 200 and 300 calls a day from newsagents, access is important. We sent a newsfeed direct to the point of sale software desktop of our users, posted information on the Tower blog and emailed all of our users.
This post was orignially about the outage but since it has been fixed I have modified it to reflect the usefulness of the blogs and other communications channels – especially the direct to desktop RSS feed for our users.
My software company, Tower Systems, formally launched its online Training Academy for newsagents today. This is an exciting move for us and for newsagents – guaranteeing a on-goinging training opportunities which will help produce better outcomes for newsagents, their customers and their suppliers.
Free online Training Academy for newsagents and newsagent staff
MELBOURNE – March 10, 2009 — Tower Systems, Australia’s largest supplier of retail management software to newsagents has launched a free online Training Academy for newsagents.
Through the Training Academy, newsagents can access formal training designed to help them better compete in today’s environment.
This is an unprecedented opportunity for newsagents and further demonstrates the leadership of Tower Systems to its community of 1,500+ newsagents.
Fully interactive, participants learn from each other and the workshop leader – as if are in the one room – even though they can be at home or their shop. Questions are answered and live examples provided to create a professional learning experience. Each session ends with a test to gauge what has been learned and the value of the experience.
Tower Systems provides access to all training for free. There is no limit to how many workshops newsagents and their staff participate in.
“Anyone can train you about what button to press and when, this is different. We train you about the why, we help you genuinely save time and make more money.” commented Mark Fletcher, Managing Director of Tower Systems. “Training like this, months and years after you install our software, helps you unlock tremendous value from the relationship with us.”
The online program includes training on magazine management, stock control, point of sale, stock take and how to move from POS Solutions to Tower Systems.
The online training services are in addition to Tower Systems’ group and one-on-one training sessions which are delivered around the country.
Access to the Tower Training Academy is from any computer with broadband. A phone is used for toll-free audio participation.
The Tower Training Academy is part of the exclusive Tower Advantage TM initiative.
Tower Systems serves in excess of 1,500 newsagents with retail management and home delivery software. It serves more newsagents than all other software companies combined. Tower owns and operates three newsagencies – it uses its software itself and provides test facilities for supplier initiatives.
Newsagents who see their businesses as being important and connected to the local community ought to check out My Shop Is Your Shop. The My Shop Is Your Shop – Local And Proud Of It campaign was established in 2004 in support of a campaign promoting independent retailers in the UK. It focuses effort around National Independents’ Day. The brilliant website is packed with excellent resources which community-connected newsagents could adpot for use here in Australian.
Everything about the My Shop Is Your Shop campaign connectswith newsagents and how we see ourselves in the community.
Click here to download a copy of our March customer newsletter. As the photo shows, we have this in a help-yourself stand at the front of our newsagency at Forest Hill. While it is a bit of work to produce the newsletter, it is a valuable way we spread our stories to passers-by.
Tower Systems yesterday announced a comprehensive schdule of free online training for newsagents using its point of sale software. There are several new training programs including help for all the POS Solutions users transitioning to Tower. Online training is free. It is time friendly – do it at the shop or at home – and easy for staff to do without travel costs. Here is the schedule for the next two months:
I am proud that Tower continues to innovate in delivering valuable training for newsagents. It is this commitment which helps Tower Newsagents be the most IT compliant group of newsagents in Australia.
To book for any of the free online training sessions please go to the Tower website, select support and click on user training.
I served a customer yesterday who had been told by a friend to come to our newsagency for a calendar for her favourite dog breed. This customer drove past two major shopping centres in 46 degree heat to get the calendar – for her dog. She bought another calendar, a magazine and a card. When talking with her about why she would go out in such extreme heat she said she’d do anything for her dog. She told me she would be back.
We built our calendar range around special interests. This started three years ago and we have got better with time. Word of mouth driving new customers to us like I witnessed yesterday is what we have chased.
The 500 or so 2009 calendars we have on sale now for $5.00 are delivering a healthy margin, more than double what we achieve for magazines. We will sell out and end the calendar season well up – in January we were 13% up on January 2008.
A customer has asked to buy one of the Valentine’s Day posters we created for our Sophie Randall businesses.
This is the second time we have encountered this in the last few months at Sophie. Apparently, the customer loves the image of the girl kissing the frog and they want it for their bedroom.
The requests which pass across the counter some days are odd – maybe we should be in the poster business?
For those interested, we went with the traditional looking poster as it more accurately reflects the Sophie experience we try and create – calm, subtle and emotional.
Following four filled to capacity workshops already this year, Tower Systems has scheduled four additional free online Magazine Management training sessions. The additional magazine management training sessions will cover the latest requirements for fficient and compliant magazine EDI returns and control. They are to be held:
Access is free. To book, please go to the Tower website, click on support and select User Meetings. You can have the website update your Outlook calendar as well. You can also book by emailing bookings@towersyste
here is what one newsagent said who participated in one of these sessions last week:
Thank you to Rowan & Michael for the great session on Magazine Management. It was my first experience at online conferencing and I found it very easy to listen and also to see what was going on. I certainly had many of my questions answered and will now need to re-look and have another go at the fine tuning process. I’m sure I’ll be in touch again when I get stuck!! Thanks Guys – much appreciated – especially down here on the south coast of NSW. Regards, Rosemary Rosemary Oates Tuross Head Newsagency
These postcards make customers happy – when they browse and when they purchase. Their positive message is infectious to people open to feeling happy. They are part of a range we have from Compendium. In several of our stores are have a happy space where everything is about nurturing happiness. We have not signed the space or made it obvious in any way other than through the placement of products. The products are popular. They are purchased on their own and as a small gift to go with a greeting card. Besides the postcards, there are booklets, books, cards and trinkets. Besides being happy with the sales, this part of the shop is good to visit as the products inspire as well as the customer who browse them.
Jason, the Manager of our newsXpress Forest Hill store was bitten by a customer yesterday. The customer was trying to retrieve two credit cards he handed over for a transaction. Jason suspected, based on a call from our bank’s fraud department on Monday, that one of the cards was stolen. The customer became agitated and got behind the counter while Jason was on the phone to be bank. In the ensuing altercation, the customer bit Jason and escaped. The Police came can and gathered evidence of the assault.
This all started with a transaction on December 26 for which a customer used a stolen credit card to transfer money to a prepaid card. Since it went through the bank we did not know of a problem at the time. One the same day a similar transaction using the same card was done at our Frankston newsagency. The bank called us Monday and from then we were on alert.
Yesterday, when an identical transaction was presented at Forest Hill, Jason stepped in. His role as Manager of the business does not require him to be physically attacked by customers like this. The Doctor treated the wound and gave Jason a tetanus shot, it will be three months before he knows if the bite introduced any infection.
We have tightened prepaid Visa card loading transactions and now will only take money from another card if the customer has the PIN number. While the bank does not require this we feel it is an appropriate precaution.
A customer complained at one of our stores yesterday that because of us, their son now knows that Santa Clause is not real. Their son saw a Letter From Santa at our counter and when they got home he asked them about it. The customer returned to the store and complained face to face and then asked for the number of the store manager to take the complaint to a higher level.
When I heard the story I initially thought it was a joke. For a child to see and read the Letter from Santa on our counter he or she would have to be at least six or seven. Further, there are many indicators in many retail businesses, on TV and online that Santa is not real.
I would be shocked if ours was the only store where this boy’s belief in santa was challenged. If there was a risk of this why take him shopping at all? But this is not a conversation to have with the mother, she is too angry at us.
I did some research online this morning and there are mixed views about when to let your children know that Santa is not real. The consensus appears to be between seven and nine – certainly before they hear about it from other children … and shops, maybe.
The stories one hears across the counter some days are truly amazing.
I spent five hours behind the counter working in one of my shops this afternoon. While I am in my shops regularly and invariably serve customers, I rarely put in more than a hour at the coounter in any one stint. The experience today reminded me…
I would love our suppliers to spend time behind the counter on a day like today. They would learn why we get frustrated at out of date practices they force us to use, the supply of product on uncompetitive terms and lack of control in our businesses thanks to restrictions they impose. But those are points for another time.
Beyond working with a couple of exceptional team members today and learning from the joy they showed in serving customers, is the happiness of our customers themselves – Christmas kicked in for me thanks to them.
I was driving past another Tattersalls billboard promoting their online offering yesterday and was thinking about how we can compete against their lure of customers from retail
Customer service is the best way we have of competing with the growing online lottery business.
I can hear people yawning or reaching for the back button already. Hear me out.
If you are like me, every time you are at the counter you have someone wanting to check a ticket or ask a lottery question. No sale, just the service. No website experience can match an exceptional retail experience. However, it will come close if we provide poor customer service. We have an obligation to each other to provide these free services – ticket checks, answering questions and the like – for lottery products as if our future depends on the customer satisfaction.
The less we remind people of the benefits, through service, of face to face retail the less they will think of us next time they need to purchase.
I am not happy about the various lottery agencies pursuing growth online. I cannot change their decision. I can, at my counter, stop giving customers a reason for looking elsewhere.
Sam, a Sydney taxi driver, delivered one of the most amazing customer service experiences I have ever had. Yes, a Sydney taxi driver!
Sam, I don’t know his surname, has been driving taxis for nine months. Prior to that he owned a couple of Italian restaurants and had worked in hospitality in Sydney for thirty years.
I met Sam at around 9:30pm Thursday night when I had to catch a cab from Sydney airport back to the city when I had left my laptop at my hotel. This caused me to miss my flight. While I will not bore you with the details, because of Sam I picked up the laptop and made it on a flight to Melbourne, overcoming airline and other obstacles along the way.
Sam made it happen. Just when had resolved to staying the night in Sydney and catching a 6am to Melbourne Friday, Sam made it work out.
I don’t usually talk to taxi drivers. Nothing against them it’s just that when I travel I stay in my own world. Sam made that difficult. The moment I slid into the passenger’s seat next to him he turned and with a big grin said help and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Sam, welcome to my taxi”.
It was such a different experience to what I experience from the hundreds of taxi rides I take each year that it was a shock. With his greeting Sam set the mood and that was key to resolving the challenges of getting getting to the city, collecting my laptop, getting back to the airport and making a flight I had no booking for.
The experience with Sam was the kind of experience I am sure all newsagents crave to have delivered across the counter in their shops with every transaction. In our 40 minutes together Sam got to the heart of good customer service based on his years in hospitality:
Sam made it clear that by living by these rules we was able to find for himself the life he wanted. I have Sam’s number and will call when I next need a taxi in Sydney.
Some phonecard companies recently changed their terms, effectively increasing costs for customers. One introduced a surcharge of 69 cents once a call passes three minutes, another introduced an 80 cent disconnection fee and another introduced a daily service fee. There are other changes beyond these. The per minute cost is just part of the equation. My point is that newsagents are relied upon to have up to date product knowledge. Unless we get out and research all phone card companies we cannot know.
I am aware of the changes because of my commercial involvement with the people behind the Aussie Phonecard.
At the River View Hotel in Brisbane on Friday, I received one of the best customer service experiences I can recall. What really excited me about the customer service experience is that it had nothing to do with personal service. No, this exceptional experience had to do with business standards and processes.
I was at the River View Hotel to present a session on How to Build a Stronger Newsagency as part of the Tower Systems Spring National Tour. I get to see many hotel functions rooms every year – the experience Friday was the best I can recall in a long time.
Beyond receiving what we had booked and paid for – the room, chairs and tables setup as we asked, a screen, power board, coffee, tea, cakes etc – they provided other items we had not requested, items which their back-office processes ensure are provided for each conference and meeting booked at the hotel.
Outside of the usual extras we see provided for meeting rooms such as pads, pens, mints and water for attendees, a white board and one or two markers (which often don’t work), they provided a fully stocked stationery kit with a full set of working whiteboard markers, whiteboard eraser, tape, scissors, a spare power cord, stapler, pens pencils and a host of other items which could be useful during a conference. They also provided fire evacuation information on the presenters table – this is usually hidden on a wall – as well as a clean rubbish bin. They also had a clearly market central place where messages are left – so as to not interrupt any session.
For these Tower Sessions we get to a range of venues from five star capital city hotels to country pubs. These extra items, no matter how small they may seem, demonstrate a level of thoughtfulness I rarely see in conference rooms. While you can often ask for them it was that they were there waiting for us as part of their process which impressed me.
On the flight on the way home I was thinking about this, the back-end processes in business, which ensure an exceptional customer experience. It is what fast food companies like McDonalds brought to Australia – back-end processes which improved the overall service.
My sense is that Australian newsagents can improve back-end processes to improve the customer service experience. I know that we can in the businesses I own. Here are some ideas I think we could implement at the back-end to improve the customer experience:
A good example of a change is either ensuring you have a credit card machine at every register or a wireless credit card machine so that customers don’t have to move from one point to another to enter a PIN number.
This is all about delivering an experience your customers enjoy and which is unexpected, an experience you can systemise in a way to ensure consistency and ease of delivery. If you can do this you will, have customers spreading good word of mouth as I am about the River View Hotel in Brisbane.
When customer service is your point of difference it where you need to make the biggest investment.
Just as foreign language newspapers are popular in newsagencies so too are foreign language Christmas cards. It makes sense to sell the cards since we have the market with newspapers. My only minor beef is the range – it would be good to have better quality designs and more of a range from which to choose. That said, this is the kind of product newsagents excel with as it connects with existing customer traffic. It is another way to demonstrate a community connection which is second to none.
My software company, Tower Systems, has been delivering free online training and user meetings this year in addition to the seventy or or face to face user meetings around the country. The online series is proving to be a great success with close to full attendance at most sessions. We have a cap of fifteen attendees. We have purchased access to the Web Ex platform – this is a widely used conferencing platform and provides good management of video and audio to create a professional and comfortable online meeting experience.
Next week we are repeating one of our most popular online training events – a Meet The Experts session where we make available one of the mist skilled Tower team members:
We are offering these sessions to help our users more directly connect with our most senior people and thereby get more from your software. Participation is free. All you need is a phone for a toll-free call and a computer with broadband connected. Please book by emailing bookings@towersystems.com.au.
What is really good about these sessions is that we get to connect newsagents who would not usually meet.
Click here to see a copy of the latest newsletter we have produced for our Sophie Randall businesses. We place new issues each month in a stand in front of each shop – going through around 200 a month. We are quite passive about distribution – we do not hand them to customers from the counter or mail them. This newsletter is designed specifically for passers-by. It works. Customers come in that day or sometime later and ask about featured product.
I think it is time newsagents took ownership of the training delivered about running a newsagency. The five day training course run by the ANF sees the bulk of the money paid by newsagents to the ANF flow to the trainer who, as I understand it, owns much of the course content. Some of the content itself is, as one recent attendee told me, not practical to running a newsagency. I’d like to us develop genuinely valuable training which we as a channel own.
The training I envisage would be in addition to a more formal Certificate IV in Retail, it would be newsagency specific and focus on our unique processes with a goal of helping new newsagents and new managers to better manage their businesses. It is training which could be delivered in modules and be useful through the life of a newsagent.
The content would be newsagent (and not supplier) controlled.
Too many newsagents are doing the ANF training and hitting a brick wall six months later when facing issues they training did not cover yet which are common to our businesses.
The current ANF training has served its purpose and it is time for newsagents to take control.
We introduced online training at Tower Systems earlier this year. Our magazine management workshop has been particularly successful. It covers the technical and operational aspects of managing magazines. That it is online, single topic focused and relatively short in duration means newsagents are able to learn and apply in quick succession – knowing the course will be rerun in a few days if they want a refresher or to discuss what they have done and ask questions.
By the end of this year, Tower will have run more than 130 online training workshops for newsagents. This speaks to the success of online as a delivery platform for newsagent training. Of interest to some will be news that we are about to launch a Mandarin online training course.
Staples in Canada has announced plans to roll out what it is calling video agent customer service stations. Customers use these to speak with a call centre which directs the query. This is a big contrast to the personal service one receives in small business. Sure Staples is a huge retailer compared to, say, a newsagency. However, Officeworks, their Australian comparison, competes with us in the suburbs for stationery business. I am sure they will continue to hunt down ways they can cut labour costs – such as this video agent customer service station. Hence the importance of us concentrating on live in the flesh customer service.
Foxtel has no customer service. They don’t want customers to contact them. Once they have you signed up, they make it almost impossible for you to speak to a service representative about a technical problem.
I have a Foxtel iQ and a Foxtel regular set top box at home. The service on both has been out since Monday. Each time I call the company it automatically resets the boxes and says if the problem continues I should call back. I call back and they reset the boxes again. The only way to get a human to answer is to pose as a sales prospect, they answer the call quickly. Thankfully, one of their human sales people walked the office and found a technical person. This was unsatisfying because all he could do was book inan appointment for a visit.
If Foxtel cared about customer service they would provide a help desk I could call where I could talk to a human. They would make it easier for me to get satisfaction instead of having to wait what will be five days before even having the problem diagnosed.
When speaking to the human yesterday I asked for a service manager to call me. He refused to arrange this. When I complained about lack of service, he said I am on the phone now. he cared less that the service had been out for three days.
Sorry for this off topic post. My hope is that it will attract the attention of Foxtel management or, better still, give a potential Foxtel customer reason to pause and investigate Foxtel service before signing up.
Newsagencies are customer service businesses. We have to be with everything we sell being available elsewhere. This is what competition is about. Foxtel has no competition yet. The next few years will change that as the computer takes over from the TV as the delivery channel for content.