http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...-shoppers.aspx


5 ways rude cashiers rile shoppers

By failing to pay customers common courtesy, indifferent clerks chase away
business. Most of the blame lies with management, but shoppers can also be
better customers.


By Karen Aho

"Retail stores are often huge and complex operations, but the battle for
customers is won or lost at the cash register.

Lost, mostly.

"It's about respect, whether it's the cheapest place in town or the most
expensive," says Lou Carbone, the founder and CEO of Experience Engineering,
a customer-service consultancy. "These companies lose customers, and they're
not even sure why."

Talk back: What's your pet peeve about store clerks?

But the customers know why. Their pet peeves:

Not making eye contact. This is the "grab and scan," as it's called by Karen
Chalmers, a mother of three who recently boycotted her area big-box store
after a different small act of rudeness. "They just ignore me. It makes me
feel like I'm not even a person."

Answering the phone. "We're ALREADY in the store!" blogger "Phil801" writes.
"You've won our business already! Take care of us!" His tongue-in-cheek
solution? While standing in line, program the store's number into a cell
phone and call the misdirected clerk.

Chatting to other clerks. "It's unbelievable. You can be looking right at
people who are busy talking to an associate, and they ignore you," Carbone
says. "It makes you feel unimportant, insignificant. It causes you to feel
insufficient. It makes you feel very small."

Not counting change back. When did it become the customer's responsibility
to fumble through a wad -- coins balanced precariously on paper -- to ensure
accuracy? "It's just another example of a disrespectful service act," says
Leonard L. Berry, a distinguished professor of marketing at Texas A&M
University's Mays Business School. "And then, once you get the change, not
even thanking you for the purchase. That hurts more for many people."

Walking past shoppers who need help. American workers today are often
disengaged from their jobs, "physically there but psychologically absent,"
says John Todor, the author of "Addicted Customers" and a psychologist and
managing partner at The Whetstone Edge, a customer-centric consultancy in
California. "That's what's at the root of some of these things. . . . What
it says to the customer is 'I don't matter.'"


Customers who feel bad don't come back, even if the price is right.

"We always have these antennae out there," Todor says. "If the clerk is
acting like a drone, doing their job technically, then you feel like you can
be rude back."


Service is not dead

If you sense that there's more rude service than there was a generation ago,
you're probably right, industry consultants say. It could be a general
decline in manners or a decrease in social engagement, which dulls empathy,
they say.

More people indicate a desire for helpful staffers in recent years,
according to surveys by Gartner, an international research firm. And the
American Customer Satisfaction Index, considered a leading indicator of
customer service, shows a 5.2% drop from 1994 to 2007 in customers'
satisfaction with discount and department stores. It's a significant
decline, said the head of the survey, University of Michigan business
professor Claes Fornell.

"Many of these stores are somewhat strapped for resources, and they're
cutting at the front line, and customers are not pleased about it," says
Fornell, the author of "The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the
Battle for Buyer Preference." "In the long-term perspective, this is
probably not the best strategy."

However, Wal-Mart, with an astounding 15% drop in satisfaction since 1994,
accounts for a decent chunk of that decline. In scores by industry,
supermarkets and hotels have remained constant in the past 15 years.
Specialty retail stores have risen 2.7%, banks 5.4% and limited-service
restaurants 13%.

Good service may have taken a beating in places, but clearly shoppers don't
think it's dead. So why the register rage?


Bad service starts at the top

Alain J. Roy has been advising businesses on customer service for a
quarter-century and says the answer is a no-brainer. In 99% of his cases, he
identifies the same problem: "the owners and the managers."

"It is so simple, and managers make it so complicated," Roy says. "They go
to seminars, they buy books, they change the color of the store -- all along
not showing appreciation of the employees.

"I'd go in and say, 'I won't help you unless you change managers,'" Roy
says.

Those that didn't oust management were back to bad service within six
months.

"They did not show respect to the employees," Roy says. "In turn, the
employees did the same thing to the customers." Only a small percentage of
employees are able to keep a good face despite being treated poorly, he
says.

The converse is also true. In the latest MSN Money customer-service poll,
companies with the highest rankings spoke repeatedly of their efforts to
treat employees with respect. (See "10 companies that treat you right.")

Attitude runs from the top down, Roy says, and bad service may be more
prevalent in large chains that focus on profits and fail to oversee distant
managers.


Continued: Improvement in service

Service will improve

Years ago, Roy filled a cart to the brim at a Home Depot store in San Diego.
Then a clerk was rude. He abandoned the cart and spent the afternoon driving
to three different hardware stores, spending 15% to 20% more. "And I felt
good doing it," he says. (Proving his thesis that the problem lies with
on-site management, he says, he now gets excellent service at a Home Depot
in Nebraska.)

Shoppers won't stand for rudeness. At every income level, shoppers will pay
extra in order to feel good about where they spend their money. The
exception may be during extremely tough economic times, Fornell says.

A 2007 study by The Verde Group, a Canadian consulting firm, and the Wharton
School's Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania
said unhelpful sales clerks were the biggest knock to a store's reputation.

A mere lack of eye contact was enough to turn people away for good. And more
than any other aspect of a store, clerks who ignored customers prompted the
most bad-mouthing -- a dangerous blow to any company.In the long term, it's
the companies that invest in customer service that thrive.

If buyers cared only about price, then Wal-Mart would have decimated Target,
Texas A&M's Berry says. "Even though the perception is that Wal-Mart has
lower prices, Target represents a formidable competitor because Target
offers better service."

In the 2007 American Customer Satisfaction Index, which takes price into
account, Target scored 77 and Wal-Mart 68 on a scale of zero to 100, with
100 being best.

"We don't change the way we feel because we're in a lower income bracket,"
Carbone says. "Human beings are human beings."

Although the discount giant's sales stand out among those of other
struggling retailers, the company is not keeping its customers happy.In the
same vein, happy, pleasant, polite clerks also don't cost more.

"Of course, pay makes a difference in terms of the pool of people you can
compete for, but pay isn't really the key factor here in whether you're
going to have a well-mannered, well-trained, ready-to-serve staff," Berry
says. "The key issue is much broader. It's about hiring the right kind of
people to begin with and treating them well. Treating them like customers."


Be a good customer

In the meantime, what can shoppers do?

First, make sure the problem isn't you. Don't be a bad customer:

Do your part. Call ahead and check that an item is in stock rather than
railing at the store's staff later. Take the advertisement for that one sale
item with you. In other words, know what you want. Clerks are not
omniscient.

Don't expect a clerk to be your mother. If you drop something, pick it up.
If you move something, put it back. If you spill something, clean it up.

Talk to a clerk as if she were your mother. Does this need explaining? Ask,
don't demand. Smile. Be respectful.

Get off your cell phone. Clerks may not need you to scan and bag items, but
they might have a question and do require prompt payment. Plus, it's just
rude.

Play by the rules. Don't use the express lane if you don't have an express
load. Don't ask clerks to change a price for you, to accept expired coupons
or to give you freebies. For more, see this post at everything2.com.

Act your age. Don't open seals without asking. Don't throw a tantrum when a
clerk isn't authorized to give a rebate or can't pull an out-of-stock item
out of his armpit. Try reading an item's manual at home before returning to
yell at a low-wage worker.

Be friendly. Tell the clerks something upbeat. Let a manager know that the
nice clerks are why you shop there. Mood is contagious, and positive
reinforcement works.

And if smiles and respect don't do the trick:

Complain to management only if it's one clerk. "If it's a common occurrence,
going to the manager won't solve it," Roy says. "If he doesn't have it
solved yet, he or she should not be there."

Contact competitors. Let them know how much you'd like some competition, and
good service, in your neighborhood.

Talk with your feet. "I don't think there's a better way to deliver a
message than to not buy at a store where you're not treated well," Roy says.

Let headquarters know. If you care enough and think the corporate office
does, too, write a letter to the CEO to say that service matters and you're
defecting. Many do listen..."

Published Sept. 10, 2008