“Charles Formula for Success in Retail”, or “how to be a good check-out chick when you secretly hate people”.
Once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made. -- Unknown
For about five years, I was Charles the check-out chick. During this time, I got an inordinate number of commendations from customers, despite the fact that I'm really an antisocial introvert agoraphobe who hates meeting people. (how's that for tautology?) Anyway, as an aside to a discussion I had this evening, I decided to post my formula for successful customer service to my journal.
Customer service is the intersection of two opposing forces:
- The customer wants to be treated like a unique human being
- The shop-assistant doesn't have the energy or patience to deal with a thousand unique human beings in one day.
There are other forces at work as well, of course. For example, there's the Temporal Dilation Effect of Queues: when someone is at the head of the queue, they want as much time spent on them personally as possible, whereas when they are behind the head of the queue, they just want you to deal with everyone as quickly and efficiently as possible. On the other hand, that's sort of already covered by rules 1 and 2 above.
The trick to surviving eight hours full of unique human beings is to recognise that people really aren't unique at all. There's a limited number of personality types when it comes to shopping, a very limited number of applicable situations, and given a week you can come up with a script that covers all these situations. Come up with several scripts, you just need three or four for each of the major interactions, and one each for the uncommon ones. Remember to include a few jokes: they don't have to be funny, they're just a sign you're making an effort to be personable.
The most important part of these scripts is that they sound natural. This is where the quote at the top comes in. Generations of "experts" have consulted with retail chains to come up with the "perfect" patter between customer and salesperson. Inevitably, you get ordered to use this, and inevitably it sounds absolutely fake. Find out how much of the supplied script you can get away with discarding (I discovered the only line they insisted on at Target was that you say "Is there anything else?" instead of "Is that all?") and discard it. Say "Have a nice day" to all your customers and you sound like a drone. Alternate between "Enjoy yourself", "See ya", "Have fun" and "Bye", and you're offering the same semantic content, but it sounds like you actually care.
This brings us to another point, rotate your scripts. People don't feel unique if you tell them to "Have a nice day", just like you told the last five customers in the queue. This is why you need three or four scripts for the common events. If you're having a particularly energetic day, you can attempt to ad-lib, but most of the time you just don't need to. People who worked with me often got quite amused by this - they'd look at me incredulously at the end of the day and repeat one of the jokes that I just used on fifty different people, each time as if it was the first time I'd thought of it.
The aim here is that you can go into robot-mode. Customer shows up. You go through the mechanical actions, recite script #2, and as long as you remember simple things like eye contact and a genuine-looking smile, the customer will never guess that they only ever make it into your short term memory, and five seconds after they're gone, they're not taking up important brain-space any more.
Of course, this makes repeat customers a problem. If someone shows up week after week, they'll eventually notice that you can never remember who the hell they are, and realise that they're not making any lasting impression. I'm sure that in my four years or so at Target, there were people I saw quite regularly, but because nobody ever made it past the short-term memory, I probably disappointed them by not greeting them like long-lost friends.
On the other hand, nobody really mentioned it to me.
