April FAQ - Creating a Customer-Focused Culture in Retail?

One Friday each month, I dedicate the post to looking at some questions I have heard recently from developing leaders. Sharing those questions and my thoughts for them is a way for me to spread the information to as many leaders and future leaders as possible. If you have a question about leadership, or just a situation you would like some additional insight on, please email me at Effective Retail Leader. Let’s take a look at this week’s question.

I feel like I can offer more within my store to my customers. How can I create a customer-focused culture?

I love the sentiment and ambition in this question. It definitely sounds like a retail, buzzword-heavy topic that I hear from many a leader. Focused is one of those trigger words for me. Overused, misunderstood, well-intentioned. (See why I hate the word focused.) Culture is another one that is a powerful statement: a necessary outcome, but not always done in the easy way we may think. Cultures are enabled by leaders, not created.

Those pieces aside, let’s discuss the underlying question here and build an experience that your customers (and employees) will love.

If your desired outcome is a culture in which the customer consistently feels special, then the first and best place to start is with you. Modeling the desired behaviors you want your team to demonstrate both sets the stage for a culture to evolve, and shows the team your expectations. There is no getting around this step. Especially on something as complex as service standards, an approach of, “do as I say, not as I do” will not work in this critical area of your business. (It rarely does anywhere.)

Customers will never be treated in a better way than the leader treats the team in the environment.

Ensure your team members feel like valued customers themselves. Do you and your other leaders in your location serve your associates in a way that would encourage them to serve others in the same way? Customers will never be treated in a better way than the leader treats the team in the environment. If you are asking the team to make the customers feel special, your team must feel special first.

Empower the team to make the decisions needed for the customer. You’ll read this sentence and agree. Empowering the team sounds great, highly necessary, difficult to do. This begins by asking questions, observing, and providing feedback. This is one-hundred percent about the actual culture in your location. If your team does not make decisions for the customer today (your culture), you’ll need to uncover why they feel as though they cannot, which is why they don’t. Many employees believe their role is to protect the company. Every business has a small percentage of customers that will take advantage of their goodness. Do you think Nordstrom doesn’t have people who abuse their very liberal return policy? Ritz-Carlton? How about Disney? Of course, they have a one percent club, they just choose not to allow that group to distract from what can be delivered to the other ninety-nine percent. You can do the same. Be consistent in your approach, and come back to where we began — ask questions, observe, and coach.

Creating an environment that consistently delivers a high-level of customer service and experience is a real challenge. If it were easy, it would not be so elusive for so many businesses. It will take time and a steady approach from you and your entire leadership team. Your collective leadership behaviors will turn into the output behaviors of your team. I define culture as the collective set of behaviors of the team experienced by those who enter their environment.

Shift your question from asking how you can create a customer-focused culture to asking how you are  leading and enabling a team committed to providing a consistently excellent experience in my location. Model the behaviors, treat your team the way they will treat the customer, and enable them to make decisions in the customer's favor every time. That will be a recipe for success on your quest for a better service experience.

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