Customer Service Strategies: The ‘Pete’ Story

October 12, 2016

– Lucy specializes in customer service training, recruitment and hiring. She can be reached at 866.645.2047, lucyg@hireguru.com, or www.hireguru.ca.

CUSTOMER SERVICE – We have dubbed this column ‘Banana Junction’. Here’s the story behind it.

Pete a green grocer in the Maritimes immigrated to this country with $200 and a background in British stall sales.  In other words, he was one of a long line of fruit and vegetable stalls lined up in Covent Garden, London, competing for business. You had to have personality, assertiveness and the best produce to attract customers.

He eventually established a chain of unique green groceries in the area. On Thursday nights, he would order his bananas for his three biggest selling days – Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and he would worry. If he ordered too few cases of bananas, his customers would go elsewhere to buy their produce. If he ordered too many, he would be stuck with rotting fruit.

Bananas go from green, to yellow, to little brown dots, to black and exploding in three days. His profit margins depended on ordering the exact quantities. “My inventory is rotting on my shelves as we speak!” Pete worriedly exclaimed regularly.

Pete’s epiphany came when his worry reached epic proportions one Thursday night driving home from work, worrying about… bananas. “I’m working on the wrong end of the problem”, he suddenly realized. “I should be working on my staff: teaching them to sell more bananas, giving customers serving suggestions, and more interaction to make customers feel valued and important.” And that’s the day that Pete began to overhaul his customer service levels.

Now when you go into Pete’s you’ll experience an amazing shopping experience. There’s a top-hatted greeter at the door, a piano player up in the rafters setting the mood, all staff are highly trained in both product knowledge and customer service expectations and techniques. And the bananas fly off the shelves 7 days a week.

If Pete thinks they’ll need 75 cases, he will buy 100 cases and challenge his staff to move the product. And they always do. Pete raised his own expectations of his staff, and he raised their expectations of their abilities and came up with an unequalled shopping experience for his customers.

The pressure Pete felt about his bananas is the pressure all owners should feel about their inventory. The answer is not how much inventory, but how much customer service and how great a customer experience is had.

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