You are not selling chicken. You’re selling an experience.
In Trinidad and Tobago retail brands have a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves on service and get the benefits that come with it. My 8 years of experience at KFC showed me that people’s decision to return to your store is hugely influenced by how you treat them. In fact, according to KFC studies the service elements are a bigger influence on if customers come back than the food and value attributes added together. Based on my observation it seems like most companies in T&T have given up on even trying to improve their customers’ experience. They believe that it is enough of a challenge to get a body, anybody with a heartbeat, to put to stand in front of the cash register.
More advertising only serves to amplify bad service
So their focus continues to be driving people into their stores through advertising and the flavor of the decade, Facebook. When we do that, it is like inviting people into our home and we are really not ready to host them. We rely on the low expectations of service that we believe our customers have and we also believe that our competitors are in the same boat as us, so the playing field is level. That kind of thinking is a ticket to mediocrity and ultimately demise.
I have read many times that the most effective form of advertising, bar none, is word of mouth. Some people think the latter is slow, so even that they are not afraid of. But the internet is changing that in this land of “accept anything” we call sweet T&T. Yet we remain transfixed on the media schedule and other marketing drivers as the main means of maximising awareness and getting traffic and transactions and building relationships with people.
How many retail brands in T&T are doing mystery shopping? How many are measuring their customers’ experience? How many even have identified a list of attributes that they believe are important to their customers? How many have told their staff the game plan and what they want to win on? The simple truth is that this is hard work. It’s much easier to call your ad agency, whip out the cheque book and grp ourselves into customers’ hearts.
Spend more time with your Service Trainers than your Ad Agency
And because we have valued advertising agencies more than training and measuring agencies, guess which one is more developed in T&T. One simply doesn’t go fishing where there is no fish so enough people don’t pursue service improvement related businesses. We develop the skill sets that we reward and as a country we need to build the infrastructure for service delivery and training, inside and outside organisations.
Clearly, this is not ‘either or’, advertising and promotions VS service training. They can live in the same house and they need each other. But the imbalance needs to be remedied and fast. It starts with an acknowledgement that customer service could be the next defining battleground for marketers. Why? Because it might be the only thing left for brands to have a sustainable edge. Price, product, place and promotion advantages have become harder to hold on to for long. All furniture and appliance stores sell more or less the same fridges and stoves, on the same price terms, close enough to their customers whom they all reach through print, digital and electronic media.
Making this change to putting service on the front burner calls for an unlearning and detoxification of the same ol’, same ol’ way of doing business. It needs a revolution and it starts with the CEO. If she does not believe in it, game over. In that case, stick to the status quo and don’t start yet another company programme. The local word for that is mamaguy.
If we are serious about winning our marketing battles, developing great brands, driving sales and making more money we can’t continue to do as if treating customers well is an optional brand feature. Customer Service is the New Marketing.
