A TALE OF TWO BURGERS

No doubt you’ve had the experience of traveling along the highway with a rumbling stomach when, all of a sudden, there’s a billboard advertising a juicy, mouthwatering, cheesy hamburger, available within seconds at the fast food joint only one short exit away. Agreeing with your stomach that it sure looks good, you speed up a bit to get there faster, dreaming of splashing it all down with a cold drink.

But as you get ready to devour your meal-in-a-box, reality hits. This burger looks nothing like the picture. In fact, it looks more like a two-year-old slapped it together from pieces of other burgers. You, my friend, have just experienced one of the underlying themes shoppers complain about most often: a disconnect between a brand’s image and the actual customer experience.

If your store’s brand doesn’t match your typical customer’s experience, get on the phone to HR right now. You may not have much time to undo the damage that’s been done. While many customers will put up with an occasional snafu in service or expectations, consistently disconnecting from your brand with bad customer service and substandard products will kill interest in your product. When this happens, your only hope is to prioritize the training and monitoring of your frontline staff to revive public interest and match your service and product with those pretty pictures in your advertisements.

True, customers are fickle. One day they want you to leave them alone to wander the store, and the next day they complain no one is helping them. But the bottom line is, customers who consistently have poor experiences will look for someplace else to shop. And they tell their friends. No retailer wants to suffer bad word-of-mouth. The Internet has made it all too easy to turn the tide of a brand’s popularity with a few truthful, albeit wicked, stories in a very short amount of time.

Retailers must be seriously supportive of ongoing training and coaching for sales associates based upon the principles of excellence in service. This is the only true competitive advantage in an industry where your brand may sink or swim based on public opinion. Companies who seek assistance in developing and maintaining strong training and coaching programs often need a comprehensive mystery shopping program to cultivate the strong frontline staff that drives sales, and provides managers and store owners with the ongoing, meaningful data necessary to maintain and continue to build on those increases in both sales and customer loyalty.