Retail – Undercover Customer Experience Visit #2

Introduction

Undercover customer experience visits were conducted to 9 locations of a carpet retailer, anonymously assessing 26 team members for customer service variabilities.

Challenge

The challenge this business was confronted with –

  • Lack of knowledge of what the customer service and sales abilities of team members was like.
  • Had a strong suspicion that some team members were treating walk-in customers very differently to referred customers from builders.

Solution

Assessment was conducted on 4 categories.

  • People
  • Service
  • Closing and
  • Follow ups

Benefit

People category –
11 team members were high performers and scored over
80% with 2 achieving 100% in this category
10 team members fell in the 70% range and 5 were below 60%

Service category
11 team members scored over 80% with 3 achieving 100%
10 team members achieved between 60-70% and 5 scored
50% and below with 2 within the 5 achieving 17%

Closing category
14 team members achieved 100% in their attempt to close the sale and 8 team members fell in the 60% bracket with their closing skills. 4 team members scored 33% in their closing and 2 scored 0% as they made no attempt to close.

Follow up category
3 team members scored over 80% with 2 in this group achieving 100%. 3 team members achieved 60% and 16 below 40%. 5 team members did not follow up at all.

Result

Overall performance
8 team members scored over 80% with oneachieving 100%
6 team members scored between 70-80%
6 team members scored between 60-70%
2 team members achieved between 50-60%
3 team members achieved below 50% with 1 falling under 30%
The following issues were identified:

  • Greeting at the right time
  • Needs analysis not carried out
  • Not asking for the sale
  • Not dealing with objections
  • Suspicion that some customers were treated differently to others was not unfounded.
  • Major common weakness was the follow up