Sales, Service 'Prevention'
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 11/7/2005
In this space recently you've read a lot about retailers' attempts to provide some sort of custom installation to consumers, improve the in-store experience and enhance their sales associates' product knowledge.
While there has been progress, there are still horror stories. Here are two from the New York metropolitan area.
We received an item from Mark Lilien, a consultant with the Retail Technology Group, Stanford, Conn. He tells the story of a woman from Paramus, N.J., who wanted to buy small stereo speakers for her den. (Some of the retailer names were changed to protect the guilty.)
First, she tried a well-known New Jersey area CE specialist. The sales associate she met didn't know how to get the correct pair of speakers to play. “There was a control panel on the wall, but the buttons weren't labeled. By trying every button and walking around the room listening, we finally discovered the secret and heard what we needed to hear,” Lilien related.
The same type of problem occurred at two national CE chains she visited next. At one of them, its “well-labeled push buttons for customers to try the speaker combinations” were broken. She connected the speakers in the store herself, found a salesperson, but then found out the product was out of stock.
According to Lilien, our intrepid consumer then went to a famous local electronics/appliance chain. They had the speakers, but had to find a salesperson in another department and the price was double that of the national chain.
She went back home, went online and found the speakers she wanted on Amazon “for a price lower than [the national chain], with delivery made in three days,” Lilien reported and called the whole story “retail sales prevention.” I agree.
And then there is the case of a consumer wanting to connect an existing DVD recorder to a new HD PVR. Several times this consumer contacted the help lines of both hardware makers to make the connection himself and received not only contradictory, but incorrect, advice.
All he wanted to do was save via a DVD recorder, or even a VCR, programming already recorded on the PVR for his own use. The HD PVR's service provider sent out a crew that kind of got the system to work by suggesting a switch box that was ultimately faulty. A CE retailer's service team stopped by and worked on it for an hour and half and said, “We'll get back to you.” They didn't.
Finally CEA's TechHome.com site came through for this consumer by finding an installer in his area. The installer, Manhattan-based www.smarthomedesignz.com, stopped by and within 45 minutes, with existing cables, everything worked.
What's the moral? If you're going to talk about how installation, service, well-trained salespeople and great in-store experiences are keys to your future, don't just talk about it — do it. If you don't, there may be a competitor out there willing, ready and able to actually perform those tasks.
No related content found.
Featured Company
-
Webcollage
WebCollage, the world's leading provider of rich product information to retailer web sites (and their mobile visitors) perfected a new form of channel-marketing by helping manufacturers instantly publish content that increases sales, reduces return rates and improve conversions b..more
VIEW ALL GALLERIES