A Guide to Good In Store Customer Service Retail Restaurant Groceries

It's not difficult to provide good customer service in brick and mortar stores. It really isn't. Oh sure, there's the occasional irate customer(tm), but you know what? Customers do not, contrary to popular belief among retail workers, enter a store with the goal of being irate. They do not start their day by pouring a bowl of frosty chex muttering "today I'm going to win the World Series of Irate when I go to Widget Outlet."

If a customer is irate, it is the fault of the people who are currently supposed to be providing good customer service and nobody else.

Feel free to read that again if you didn't get it the first time. So, what sets customers on the track at the Irate 500 and picks up a green flag? Let's start with the obvious.

Even if you disagree with everything else in this article, this is one truth that is simply incontrovertible:

A customer who is in the store is the absolute top priority at that moment.

I don't care if the entire Board of Directors arrives and launches an impromptu performance of Les Miserables on the retail counter. There is absolutely nothing more important than the customer who is standing in front of a store employee, regardless of whether they are buying something, asking a question, peering quizzically at a display of wind-up mobile phones, or whatever.

It doesn't matter if the CEO himself walks up, it still should not distract the retail employee, waiter, host, grocery bagger or clerk from providing that customer with their undivided attention until that customer leaves the store with a big smile. If your CEO doesn't understand that, congratulations. Your CEO is an idiot.

If customers are waiting, every single employee. . .

Yes, even managers.

Yes, especially managers.

. . .in that store should immediately stop whatever they are doing and attend to those customers until there are no customers waiting. Period. If customers are waiting, somebody isn't doing their job. If there aren't enough employees to personally wait on every customer with as much immediacy as possible, then management is understaffing that store. If there are enough employees to immediately wait on all of the customers, and people are still waiting, then somebody in that store isn't doing their job.

The biggest obstacle to doing this part of the retail service job right is the phone. If every phone within ten miles is and has been ringing for the last 12 hours, it doesn't matter. The customers in the store are first. Want to win the irate customer of the week award? Hold a phone to your shoulder and continue a conversation standing in front of a line of waiting people.

And don't give me profits. If there are enough customers in the store that some of them are kept waiting, the store is selling enough whatever to afford to hire enough people to prevent customers from waiting. If not, then raise prices.

There is no excuse, none, for keeping a customer waiting more than 60 seconds.

If a customer can't find something, it isn't their fault. People are generally fairly competent when it comes to finding something in a store. Just because your brilliant supervisor decided to put shoelaces in the hardware department instead of next to the shoes, it doesn't mean your customers are idiots for interrupting you every 28 seconds to ask where the shoelaces are.

And when they do ask where the shoelaces are, good customer service goes with them and personally points out exactly where the shoelaces are. You do not give them a faded map and a torch and speak of the lost shoelaces cryptically while pulling at your beard.

Sending a customer on a quest guarantees one thing. That customer will be back minutes later having found nothing except the economy sized bottles of irate. At that point, someone is going to have to show them where the shoelaces are anyway, so just do it right the first time.

Then, with all the time you save, figure out a way to stop putting things in stupid places. Then people won't ask where things are, because they'll have already found them.

Walking into a retail store should not be the shopping equivalent of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Customers should not have to swerve from one edge of the aisle to the other with plywood gate cartoon clerks asking "can I help you find something?" before springing out of the way every four yards. If a customer is looking for something, they'll ask. After they ask, refer to the section on quests.

Good customer service should be invisible until the customer inhales just before asking a question. Then the supremely confident retail clerk should appear as if they had lived their whole life to that point for the express purpose of answering that one, crucially important question. After answering the question completely and correctly, they should journey on down the road of life to find new meaning, not read "is there anything else I can help you with today, sir?" from page 417 of "How to make customers flee with their screams echoing across the doomed cosmos" handbook.

If your customers have dropped to one knee, and are weeping pitifully, or they have raised their hands to the sky, tears streaming down their faces mouthing the word "why" over and over again, chances are, you didn't pay attention to the advice in this article. Good customer service is good common sense. It's neither difficult, nor does it require any great level of expertise.

Everything good for a business comes from good customer service. Customers return to stores where they get good customer service. They ask questions, which usually lead to conversations, which lead to opportunities to make additional sales.

But if there are five people, including three levels of management, crowded around a small piece of paper pointing and grunting with confused looks on their faces while a line of zombified customers darkens the horizon, its time to rewrite the company policy. Don't make customers wait. Don't send them on quests and don't be a seminar clerk. Listen carefully and look for opportunities to make things easier for your customers. This will solve 98% of customer service problems. The other 2% might just be in a bad mood, but good customer service will probably cheer them up.

Don't overthink it. When in doubt, just put down the phone and help the customers please.