Great small business customer service is the best kind of marketing
Posted by Dave Mace at 10:21 pm
If there has ever been a year when great customer service is needed, it’s 2010. While some sectors of the economy are showing signs of life, the important retail sector is lagging.
So, you can imagine my chagrin when I was treated, at best, inappropriately on a recent trip to the J.C. Penney Home Store.
So there we are on Black Friday, shopping for about $2,000 worth of furniture for our family room. Now, we buy a new piece of furniture about every 10 years whether we need to or not 
, so this was a big deal for us. In any case, we were the recipients of some of the best and the worst customer service I’ve seen in awhile.
Our furniture salesman was tremendously helpful. He was patient. He knew this was a big decision for us. He helped us with colors. He helped us with textures. He walked us all over the store. He pulled stuff up on the computer. He pulled out his giant stack of fabric swatches. In a word, he was great.
While my wife was completing our purchase order with the furniture guy, I went over to the customer service desk to return some window treatments that were the wrong size. That is, we ordered the correct size, and J.C. Penney sent us the wrong size. From word one, I got nothing but a hard time from the woman behind the counter. I gave her my receipt with my credit card transaction on it, and she insisted it was not a receipt, but rather an order ticket. She demanded some kind of packaging that I was 99 percent sure was not on the product when I received it. In any case, I was simply returning the item for store credit so I could get it in the correct size.
Unbeknownst to her, my wife was just around the corner making a $2,000 furniture purchase, while she, the customer service person, was hassling me about a simple exchange. I think you and I both know people who might have been likely to walk out the door at that point. We didn’t. This time. Lucky for J.C. Penney, because this particular store in a very affluent part of the Midwest was none to busy given that it was Black Friday and we were taking advantage of some amazing deals.
The moral of the story is for you, the small business owner, to treat every little curtain transaction like a great big furniture sale. Treat every customer like a VIP. Now, I’m not saying you should send the same offers, deals, coupons, etc., to every customer. We know they don’t all have the same value to you when you’re looking at their record in the database. But when you’re face-to-face with a customer, your words and actions should be warm, sweet and smooth, like holiday egg nog.
Merry Christmas!
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