Bring The Simple Magic of Recognition To the Retail Customer Experience and Retail Customer Service

What is recognition?

It’s being
seen, literally and figuratively, being acknowledged, being welcomed, and
being appreciated. Giving your customers recognition is essential for nearly
every type retail establishment if you want to provide a great retail customer
experience and customer service, as it is in B2B, hospitality and other service
environments.

When a
customer is arriving on a repeatvisit, they should receive a
special type of recognition: that the customer was missed,that her return fills a gap
that was there in her absence, a heartfelt ‘‘Welcome
back–we’ve missed seeing you lately.” Imagine the personal–and
commercial–difference this can make.

***

“I can’t believe that Amazon knows who I am, and my local
retailer doesn’t,” an obviously-frustrated customer told me when I interviewed
her as part of a customer service initiative for that retailer some time
ago.   [I’ve omitted the type of retailer in order to be
discreet. The lessons here apply to most types of retail business, from
specialty retailing to lodging to foodservice.]

The problem
for this customer wasn’t product selection, or pricing, or the state of the
parking lot. It wasn’t the store lighting or the return policy, or the lack of
a juice bar.

It was
something much more elemental: She felt unrecognized. She felt that this business was
telling her that her presence, her patronage, and, in a sense, her personhood,
didn’t matter.

When she
walked in, she was assaulted by the sound of silence. Or, more accurately, the
sound of employees gabbing amongst themselves, interspersed with the
tap-tap-tapping of texting.

Even with
four or five employees behind the counter and walking the floors, nobody
greeted her when she walked in or as she browsed the shelves. Nobody
acknowledged her, or admitted to recognizing her. Nobody said “hey,” or
“welcome back,” or “nice to see you again.”  This customer, I should
point out, had been to this particular store at least 20 times before by her
own calculation, buying both pricey merchandise and ephemeral knickknacks along
the way.  And, while she didn’t know the employees by name, she knew most
of them by sight. Which would mean, you’d think, that at least half of them
knew her by sight as well.

So what do we have here?  A clean, well-lit (and well-stocked and well-maintained) place for retail, with clean bathrooms, parking out back, and attractive signage in the front. But that’s so not enough.  To think that it is to misunderstand the function of physical retail.

Yes, stores sell stuff. But especially in this era where all variety of stuff can be purchased online quickly, speedily, and in some cases with the chance to evade local taxes thrown in as a guilty bonus, a retail store has to offer an element of humanity, and without this the retail customer experience–the shopping experience–loses a lot of its appeal.