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“Have you ever heard the story of Joshie the giraffe?” ask Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi at the start of The Effortless Experience , a book that spells out how to win customer loyalty. It goes like this. Joshie is the property of a little boy who stayed with his family at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Florida. After the holiday, Joshie’s owner discovered his toy was missing and to calm him down his parents told him that perhaps Joshie had simply taken an extended vacation. So what did the housekeeping staff at the Ritz-Carlton do after finding Joshie? They created a photo album with the giraffe lounging by the pool, relaxing on the beach, and making new friends with other stuffed animals. And then they sent Joshie back with the photo album and some other swag. This is the sort of story that customer service directors love. It is also a perfect example of what not to base your service strategy on, Dixon and his team assert. Based on detailed surveys with more than 97,000...

Paul Fifield and John Greenhough respond brilliantly in a letter to the FT on the subject of the “serial adultery of the modern consumer” as analysed by the FT’s Andrew Hill. The alternative thinkers offer four thoughts about assumptions that we all have and which may be wrong. ·          People do want relationships but generally with people rather than organisations. ·          Value is too often confused with low prices or discounting. “In most markets only a small percentage of customers make their decision on price alone.” ·          Customer fickleness may not be a bad thing. It is natural for customers to change their preferences. ·          How loyalty is measured. Typically customers who spend more than 50% of their grocery budget at a particular supermarket indicates loyalty. But Fifield and Greenhough’s...

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried a prominent story about a coffee bar in Westfield Stratford City and a rude cashier, who typed F***ers all come at once on a woman's till receipt and declined to apologise. The upset customer complained about the Grind Coffee Bar to Westfield staff three times but was "fobbed off at every turn", Naomi Bloomer told the paper. Eventually, Dave Dickinson, owner of theNew Zealand run bar apologised. He said: "We strive for super-friendly antipodean customer service. So we apologise to the one person that didn't experience this." There are two things of interest here. Firstly, Dave Dickinson should know that for every one person that complains there are plenty who simply walk away and never return. Secondly, on Twitter no-one has got outraged. The Camden Coffee House wrote a tweet of support and Grind replied to say it hoped that one story doesn't undo four years of hard work. Anne Cupcake said that the com...

 You get the impression from Bill Grimsey, the former boss of Wickes, Iceland and Focus DIY, that all it takes for success is some vision and some guts. He may be right. His book, Sold Out , aims to propose ways to save the high street and by extension independent retailing. What makes his book stand out, however, is not his pitch but the detail of his career in retail. For independent c-store operators there is much to think about. Grimsey provides a useful overview of how the supermarkets took over in the 1960s as more and more households bought fridges and the weekly shop became possible. The next step in giving supermarkets an edge was widespread car ownership. Grimsey describes the success of Tesco’s price cuts in 1977. He was personally involved in the next step forward, helping to deliver improvements in customer service in the late 1980s. On page 150 he provides a very useful four point summary of how to create a good impression with shoppers. Moving forward to...

I am uncertain who runs the M&S store at the service station near Benson in Oxfordshire but last night Ahmed upsold me two cans of Red Bull that I really didn't want. It was raining hard and I was quite tired when I pulled in to fill up the tank. 64 and a bit litres of diesel later I was delighted that the total on the pump was less than £100. As I looked at this I saw a sign that said buy two cans of promoted beverages and get 5p a litre off your fuel. Inside the shop, after a comfort break, I bought a bag of crisps and stood behind another customer at the till. I noticed by the door a second piece of point of sale with the offer on it. After she completed her purchase, I handed the crisps to Ahmed, the teller, and put my credit card next to the payment terminal. Are you interested in the soft drink offer, Ahmed asked, with a smile. I looked at him and as I did so his eyes flicked to the display of Red Bull behind me. As he was smiling I thought about it for a second and...

As a big fan of Gung Ho!, it has taken me a year to get around to reading Raving Fans ! by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. How many books have these guys written, I thought. Surely this is just stretching the franchise. But I was wrong. There are three rules to great customer service and the book provides a diverting story to help get the messages across. At £3.72 on Amazon and taking a couple of hours to read, is it worthwhile? Yes, if you are thinking about how your customer service could be improved. For local retailers, one of the strengths is that the authors give examples from the retail world. A department store where the staff pin carnations to your jacket and the boss sits in a desk in the middle of the sales floor, a supermarket with valet parking where people drive 40 miles to get groceries, and a service station where the attendants clean your windows and still sell petrol at less than the self-service across the way. The examples give you pl...

Shopkeepers should stop complaining about competition from the internet and look to it for ideas, Sarah Curran, founder of my-wardrobe.com, says in her latest FT column . "I remember vividly a retailers' conference in Dusseldorf, which was filled with many of the UK's leading high street names. The buzzword was 'the customer'. I wondered what their priority was before that," she says provocatively. Ms Curran started her business with a boutique in London's Crouch End. I knew who my customer was, she says, because I was the customer and I knew the retail experience I expected. But moving on-line in 2006 she had to work out how to replace face-to-face contact. On-line retailers have to create "stickiness" so that the experience is engaging. They do this by using aspirational photoshoots, editorial features and video content. The internet and social media offer many exciting ways of doing this. In contrast the high street can "often see...

"How we interact at a local level is really important to us, and that's why we've launched these local Facebook pages," Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer of Wal-Mart US, tells Fortune magazine. The full article http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/14/news/companies/walmart_stephen_quinn_leadership.fortune/index.htm  is well worth a read. Mr Quinn explains that retailing is fundamentally a local business. His marketing team has to work out how to build local communities around its 3,500 US stores. For local shopkeepers the challenge is clear. In 2012 you need to think about how you represent your shop on Facebook and similar social media and through the internet. As an exercise, go to Google and enter the word groceries and the name of your town or village. I did it for my village and One Stop came top. I did it for where I work and Sainsbury Local came top. "Our goal is to integrate into the things that are happening in a local commun...

On-line retailing still requires great customer service, Nick Robertson, chief executive of ASOS, told retail employers at a Skillsmart Retail seminar this week. Set up before the rise of social media (Facebook and Twitter and YouTube), ASOS has expanded internationally on the back of customer demand. It had no plans to launch in Australia but has huge sales there because social media helped shoppers to find ASOS. A key measure of customer satisfaction for on-line businesses is to measure the number of shopper contacts to orders. For ASOS this trends between 25 per cent and 30 per cent (which means a shopper asks a question about every fourth sale). Heavy snow in the UK last year caused this to spike over 40 per cent. Distribution problems caused it to spike over 35 per cent. Customer contact is driven by email. The call centre will only call back if the first two emails fail to solve the problem. Most emails are questions about colours and sizes which are easi...

Originally published in May but given to me in a free taster issue handed out last week, the Economist has formed the view that supermarket-bashing is "elitist and muddle-headed". Its target is the Tesco bashing where the opening of a new outlet coincides with the closure of local shops. The political response from David Cameron and Ed Miliband was to "bring back the bustle to our high streets" and "people think the character of their local high street is being changed and they have no power against big corporations" respectively. What will happen? Nothing suggests the Economist, pointing out that the Competition Commission found in 2008 that the grocery market represented a good deal for consumers. The business magazine goes on to question how new the problem is, pointing to research from Surrey and Exeter universities that shows that as far back as 1939 chain stores and co-ops controlled half the market (up to two thirds today). And it shows that...

"Is it unreasonable to expect the shopkeeper to get off his phone and acknowledge me rather than just stick his hand out for the money?" tweeted the friend of a friend. My friend passed the message on to me, observing: "I saw this tweet today by one of my friends and I thought you might be interested in it. Independents pride themselves on their service, but the experience my friend had below is a common one (certainly in my experience) and not something that happens in the multiples..." There is a mix of good news and bad. The good news is that my friends clearly have high expectations of independent retailers. The bad news is that for shopkeepers who live in their shops, balancing work and phone calls is tricky. Do you have a policy of never serving while on the telephone? Do you stick to it? The place to start is to stand on the other side of the counter and ask yourself as a shopper, what value is being added by the shopkeeper? If there is ample choice o...

Local retailers will be thinking hard about the impact of the government spending review announced last week. The first thing to note is that the government is not cutting spending at all. In fact, as economist Roger Martin-Fagg points out, spending will continue to increase by 5 per cent over the next four years. What may happen, if the economy grows, is that the proportion of the economy that is accounted for by government spending will contract from 47 per cent today to a level of 40 per cent at the same time. For the purpose of comparison, spending was at 37 per cent in 1997 when Labour came to power. According to Mr Martin-Fagg, the current plans will cut spending in around 6 million houses with mortgages by £500 a year over the next four years. On the other hand, if the government did not constrain spending, interest rates would need to rise by 1.5 per cent and that would cost the same householders £900 a year – nearly twice as much. On this simple measure, the spending...

The sign says welcome but the door says stay out. In part, this arrangement is forced on the shopkeeper by the architecture of his shop. However, this door is still wrong. I know this because I walk past this shop weekly with my son after he plays football. He is on the lookout for asking his father to buy a salty snack, a soft drink or some football cards but he never suggests we go in here. In contrast, this window, less than a quarter of a mile away does plenty to draw attention to itself. It looks fantastic and simple words tell you exactly what to expect inside. I have bought family gifts here and while I will not go in every time I pass, I know where to go for beautiful gifts and homeware. Having taken the photograph I also know there is a web site. In customer service terms, I know that the people in the convenience store are more welcoming and friendlier. However, the way that they present their shop creates a barrier to shopper visits and what they sell is available everywhere...

Shopkeepers may learn good lessons from other shopkeepers who sell completely different ranges. A reason for this is that you are all competing for the attention of customers and today there is an oversupply of things for people to buy. So what works in one store can be adapted by you. I bought a copy of the April issue of Monocle because of its cover line: "The art of sell: the world's best shopkeeping and retail stars". Underneath there was a snappy illustration showing a man about town buying things. The first time I looked at the 25 stars I thought that I had been sold a pup. I was underwhelmed. On a second reading, I started to find stuff that was really interesting. Firstly, the magazine says that its guide is a "celebration of good design, the art of doing the basics well and knowing how to treat people." Looking closely at the photographs you can see how these three values interact. Second, there is a short interview with Bonnie Brooks, president of the ...

As a local retailer you need to back yourself and to have confidence in your offer to shoppers. A recent Financial Times interview with billionaire Laurence Graff, whose parents ran a tobacconist in the East End and who left school at 14 to work in the jewellery trade, provides some inspiration. First, when asked about a raid at his New Bond Street shop from which £40m-worth of gems was taken, the interviewer reports that his eyes lit up as he explained the reason for the robbery: "[Thieves] want the best!" Second, from his youth: "I saw people buying and selling. I saw as a young boy that people could make something out of nothing." Finally, at the age of 17 after learning how to repair and make jewellery he became an itinerant seller to jewellers all over England. "I knew I could sell, I knew I could do anything." As with so many successful operators, he has the ability to back his talents, to spot market gaps and to talk up his services. His story is...

Arthur Ryan, the secretive Dubliner behind the success of the Primark chain, is standing down this week and a tribute in the FT at the weekend lauded a "veteran trader who redrew the face of the high street". An analyst even provided a quote that suggested he had managed to keep all the people happy all of the time. I first came across Penneys - the Primark brand in Ireland - in the 1970s and used to buy cowboy boots and jeans there. They were cheap and cheerful and worked. In Primark, the sorts of things that I like to buy are t-shirts and underwear, summer casual clothes and so on. However, one of the secrets to shopping in Penneys/Primark was always to work out when the shop was not full and how to do returns. The canny shopper with time on his or her hands could make the cheap prices work for them. Today, I simply cannot bear to wait in the queues for the tills. While most retailers seek to reduce queues, in the case of Primark the queue may be part of the package. ...