BB
- What are your goals? Hgh customer satisfaction you say…
How many? 1000 people per year, or 10.000 people per year?
My retail store services hundreds of people a day. Some just window shop, some buy, some shoplift. I don’t have a way of counting how many we serve in some way or another per year. 100 per day would be 36,400 per year. (we are closed on Christmas)
I am not sure I have a numerical goal, measured by the amount of customers. Were it possible, to develop and launch from Hawaii a successful chain of stores around the world, it would be a great pleasure to see it happen. On the other hand, I am fairly content with a single location.
Regardless of the volume of customers, the measure of success in any business should always be the amount of happy customers.
If you were asking specifically about, “surfboard customers”, I think the same thing applies. Currently, I make surfboards in a semi retired mode and do complete boards from shape to polish all by myself just like I did in the early 70s. Consequently, my volume is comfortably modest at the moment.
Of course, any of this could change and I might even get the bug to dive back into the morass someday. There is certainly a seduction to it, that can be hard to resist But having been there, I can tell you, it isn’t near as attractive as some might think. Though it is certainly a hell of a ride!
- Customer satisfaction… What have you learned about customer satisfaction? What does it consist of? Apply your lessons learnt to the website.
Here are a couple of things learned over the years…
The diversity of needs that customers have is well…huge and they are not always rational or even comprehensible! Therefore, to make them all happy all the time, is incredibly difficult if not impossible. Mostly, customers needs are highly personal and rarely completely physical. Yet what we appear to sell as a store, is physical stuff to meet their physical needs. When in reality, what we really sell is cool physical stuff for the purpose of effecting our customers emotional and psychological needs. Not having a good understanding of this makes it very hard to please customers. Tech based thinkers often have a hard time grasping this. So guys like bike mechanics and surfboard builders often try too hard to fix what they perceive to be the customers technical problem and miss the often more important emotional issues.
Businesses can rarely serve enough customers to be effectively profitable, with only the owners of the business handling it all. Therefore, one eventually needs to hire employees to help meet the needs of customers and run the various aspects of the business. There is great difficulty in this for a couple of primary reasons. One is that the (often young) employees rarely have the ability or inclination yet to embrace the visions and learn the skills possessed by the owners. Secondly, they are rarely interested in the real needs (problems) of the customers. Without a real empathetic concern for resolving the problems each customer has, it is very difficult to make customers happy.
While employers have to do it all the time, it is very hard to take what was a young customer on one side of the sales counter one day and lift him or her over the same counter and place him behind it the next day as a salesperson in the service of the customer. This rapid role reversal of, who is being served, presents many challenges for managers trying to deliver a consistent and exceptional levels of customer service. To “satisfy” customers, employees need to be able to absorb and embrace a customers problems and in a kind of transference, take them on themselves insuring that the weight of the problem has been fully lifted off the customer and taken on by the employee.
We all recognize when this happens for us as customers and when it doesn’t. But in spite of that knowledge, for some weird reason, it is way too rare of an experience and we often find ourselves struggling to get a proper resolution to our needs. My business is not perfect but I try very hard to deliver a proper, satisfying, customer experience and stay profitably at the same time.
I mentioned ding repair in a previous post. This is a good example of where many customers need a more satisfying experience. I would like to deliver it. But without the proper staff it won’t be possible. And the business model I use of an upfront legal operation, would make it very difficult to compete with those using a less expensive business model. Because of this, it would be hard to be profitable and also pay high wages for the position without raising the retail price of the ding repairs beyond what the market might bare. It might be possible to be more expensive, but customer would have to have an exceptional experience and to deliver that I would have to find an exceptional employee! But say we were 30% more expensive… Would we be able to deliver 50% better customer satisfaction to offset the higher price? You can see then the burden of responsibility that would fall on the hired ding repair person to consistenly deliver a top quality job every time that was noticeably well beyond the competitions ability to replicate.
So… as much as I hate to turn away customers looking for ding repairs and thereby disappoint them. (low customer satisfaction) It would be a greater disservice to them to imply a higher level of service via higher prices and then not deliver it.
I would be happy to continue on this subject if others desire, but it probably should be copied to a new thread so as to keep the content of this existing thread focused on Bert and Firewire.
Jefferson Lopes says it every post: ‘theory + experience = magic’