Ask Employees How to Improve the Experience – They Know What to Do!

We continued our benchmarking of retail companies today and headed off to The Bay. I periodically shop at The Bay and am often underwhelmed by the entire experience. Today was no exception.

I decided to go to the toy section to compare prices with Wal-mart. As I browsed the aisles, I was amazed to find that very few of the toys actually had prices displayed making it very difficult to compare between the two stores. So I decided to pick up a few toys and took them over to the counter and waited in line to ask the employee to do a “price check for me”.

As she was scanning the toys, I asked her why the prices on the toys weren’t displayed. She shook her head and said, “If I were a consumer I would find it very difficult to shop here, as most of the prices are not clearly displayed.” She then went on to say that they had actually recently purchased a machine that scanned the prices on the toys - funny I hadn't seen one. I asked her where it was located - she pointed and said where all those people were lined up. She then went on to say, “In a store of this size, can you imagine that we only purchased ONE scanner? Can just picture the store at Christmas time?”

As she finished her statement, it occurred to me that I would never come to The Bay to Christmas shop for toys. The inability to do a quick price check would provide a very uninteresting and potentially chaotic customer experience.

Personally, I think that employees have great ideas when it comes to improving the customer experience. They understand what the consumer wants and are often shocked at the decisions made by someone in a corner office that is often out of touch with the day-to-day customer experience. Our advice to The Bay would be to more actively listen to your employee, as they understand what your customer wants. As well, I think you should review your customer promise of being committed to delivering excellent value and consistent, reliable service. Service is about making it easier for customers not forcing them to wait in a line-up to do a price check or wait for a scanning machine.

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