Is good self-service superior to great personal service? In many cases, maybe even most cases it is. I think we get into trouble when we assume we know what a great service is and strive to achieve a service standard that may not be what means good service to the customer.
I was in Minneapolis MN recently helping a friend stage a graduation party for her son. One of the many tasks that I undertook in this process was to head to a huge liquor outlet called Total Wine to get a selection of adult beverages for the party. I had my list and as I knew that I would be buying upwards of a dozen bottles of wine, I wanted to keep them from clanking around in the cart. Like most liquor stores, they have the boxes in which wine and liquor is delivered available to use to carry wine from the store, so I was counting on this store having those. Sure enough, this store had a mountain of boxes stacked high in the area near the registers. So I got my cart and went up to one of the checkout clerks and asked if I could have a box. Before he could respond, a store manager that was nearby came over and said “we will pack any bottles in a box for you when you check out”. I responded with, “I am buying quite a few bottles and just want to keep them from clanking in the cart, can I have one box?” The manager stood his ground and with a bit of irritation in his voice said, “We provide a box at checkout …”. I turned and walked off. I had heard enough. If he was too dense to understand my simple request for one box to put in the cart, I wasn’t going to waste any more time, so I walked off and started my shopping.
Total Wine is a BIG store, has to be nearly 30,000 square feet of every possible kind of beer, wine and liquor. I was looking for a particular brand of Pinot Noir and the same manager came into the aisle assisting another customer. After he finished with that patron, he came up and said, “Sir, I was just trying to understand how many boxes you needed”. This didn’t make any sense to me at all since I said twice up front that I wanted just one box. “I just needed one box:, I said, which he promptly went and got for me. Great! Now the wine bottles won’t rattle around in the cart. After checking everything off my list, I went to the checkout area and by chance, got the same clerk to whom my original box inquiry was directed. I put the bottles on the belt and the box at the end and after he rang each one up he put it back into the box and I put the box back into the cart. He even commented that this was much easier process to deal with. I said, “I didn’t I was making that big of a request to simply ask for one box up front”, to which he responded, “I agree, I didn’t understand what the big deal was”.
Service is such a nuanced thing. Nobody knows what good service means to another. We may have standards and train our customer-facing staff on what providing good service means, but if your service procedure is so rigid that it cannot be flexible to accommodate a reasonable service request, then it is a poor service standard. When a customer can articulate what good service means to them, then you should be looking for ways to accommodate them, not making service harder. This is especially true if the request is self-service oriented.
This got me thinking about 1974 and the Greater Gator. I grew up in a small vacation community called Palm Beach Shores in the West Palm Beach area on the east coast of Florida. Getting to Palm Beach Shores required crossing over a large bridge and there was a small grocery store that served the island community. At age 13, I starting working in the store and my first job was bagging groceries and carrying them to the customer’s car. Mr. Black owned the store and he was very serious about being a grocer. He took an interest in me and taught me many facets of being successful in business. That included learning the proper way to bag groceries. Most of it sounds like just good common sense (heavy stuff on the bottom, bread and eggs on the very top). He was especially sensitive to particular customers and how they wanted groceries bagged. Again, some of this is common sense. An older couple needed 4 half full bags of groceries instead of 2 full bags, so they could easily carry them from the car to their kitchen. By the time I was 15, I had worked in every department of the store, including the meat counter (It such a shame that today’s labor rules do not allow young people to get the experience they need, especially in tasks that could be deemed as dangerous). I was ordering groceries and making decisions, all under the mentorship of Mr. Black. Invaluable.
Today, most grocery store clerks are not well versed in bagging etiquette and the advent of the plastic T-shirt bag has left grocery bagging as a lost art. Further, since there is such a large push in being “green”, nearly all paper bags are made out of recycled bags, significantly decreasing their strength. So where a 1974 paper bag would hold a full load of groceries, today, you have to double bag, and thus, defeating the purpose of recycling. When I am grocery shopping, I generally look for a checkout where there is no bagger waiting to help so I can do it myself. Since I know I will be bagging, I put the groceries on the belt in the order I want to bag them. So heavier stuff first, but with a full load of groceries, you have to stage out waves of groceries on the belt that represents multiple bags on the other end. If I am extremely lucky, I can get all of the groceries on the belt before “help” arrives to start bagging.
Most of the time, as soon as I start bagging, someone comes along, saying some iteration of, “Ill take care of that for you sir”, to which I reply, “No thanks”. More often than not, they look at me funny or with disdain. I have even had to fight off help in my effort to bag my own groceries. I think the real issue is that by bagging my own groceries, I am saying, “I want self-service” and the store personnel is trained to provide service, not enable self-service. And lest you think this issue is only about groceries, I see this same issue occurring in financial services, particularly related to the in-branch experience. More and more, people are banking online. They access their mobile device to check balances, transfer funds, pay bills and deposit checks. Which has significantly decreased the number of in-branch transactions. I advocate that they need to enhance the branch experience by helping people understand how to do more transactions online. This in turn makes front line staff’s head explode since it seems counter-intuitive. But the fact is that it is WAY more convenient to capture a check using the camera on your phone at 10:00 at night rather than having to make a separate trip to the bank the next day. So when someone comes in to cash a check, instead of cashing it, show the customer how to use his or her Smartphone to do the deposit. The problem is that banks have trained their frontline staff to do deposits for customers, not train customers how to do their own deposits. The idea is that personal service is better than self-service. But its not. Certainly not always.
We have to stop assuming that we know what good service looks like. I have no idea with the deal with the manager of that Total Wine store was thinking but there is no reason why he couldn’t have just given me a box at my first request. If you operate a business, how can you train your customer-facing staff (and the supervisors that manage them) to think about the request that a customer is making and find ways to say, “yes” more often. And to encourage self-service, especially when the customer shows that they are interested in it. And above all, ask the customer what good service means in a given situation. For example, someone at a grocery store who sees me bagging my groceries could come up and say, “Would you prefer to bag your own groceries?” If I want to bag my own, I respond with “yes, thanks” and if I don’t I say, “no, here you can take over”. This is infinitely better than the statement, “I can bag those for you”, which requires the statement, “no, I’ve got this” or the equivalent, which probably leaves them thinking that they are not competent to bag the groceries. Setting aside that most of today’s baggers are not qualified, simple training techniques in how we ask questions can lead to a better exchange with customers to ascertain preferences. Which increases the customer’s overall satisfaction with your business. Which enhances loyalty. All while making the exchanges with customer’s less confrontational for your staff. A true win-win if I have ever seen one …