“Can I help you?” a phrase we hear less each year. There are many forms and associations with this phrase. It may be from our fellow shopper or the beckoning call of a salesperson; nevertheless, this politeness is falling from our vocabulary. Many times we as customers receive little to no good customer service in today’s shopping environment. From all of this we can see one major consequence our sin nature. When caught up in the modern world of technology and instant gratification, salespeople tend to fall short of the expectations of many customers and employers, and fail to realize it.
This modern world is composed of several attitudes, one of which being instant gratification. In a world instantaneous indulgence, salespeople lose focus on what is important to the customer. I have learned from my experience as a part-time manager in sales that many of the younger salespeople dislike having to help customers that need large amounts of personal help or advice about certain products. One of the worst salespeople I have ever worked with, “Max”, is a perfect example of this attitude. Max was raised to shop online, or at stores that focused on self-service; breeding within him an attitude that only idiots needs good customer service, and he did not keep this opinion to himself. Almost every shift he would complain about customers that “still shop the old-fashioned way.” His most indulged in complaint was that these “idiots” did not shop on the internet. The majority of his complaint was that people do not utilize the services of mobile web, Wi-Fi® and ship-to-home services that online stores like eBay®, Amazon®, Walmart.com® offer. His problem was assuming that everyone was just like him, lazy; his understanding of retail is limited to X-Box Live® and his smart phone. I have found from my experience with Max, that many salespeople, including myself, were raised to shop at non-specialized like Wal-Mart®, Sam’s Club®, and Menard’s®. These variety stores are notorious for poor customer service, and at the same time for making it easy for you us shop on our own. When we are shopping on our own and having to tend to ourselves, many times all of us as salespeople forget what it means to stay focused on what the customer needs.
Another one of the core problems is failures in training. One of the managers that trained me was notorious for doing a poor job training new employees. Not a day would go by that either I or some other salesperson would catch her applying outdated product knowledge. One time I heard her telling a new salesperson about a product, and all I can remember is thinking, “Yeah! Back in the 80’s!” This was not the first time or last that I had this form of reaction; it was a constant struggle in our store. It came to the point where we no longer paid attention to her training, and replaced her training with online and on-the-job training. This manager is the embodiment of poor salesmanship and management. She had no values in sales and training, making our store the personification of failures in training. Failures in training result in an almost predictable, exponential growth of poor salesmanship that is beginning to dominate the world of retail today; resulting in the growth of encounters with inefficient salespeople. Unfortunately, more and more employers receive complaints from customers about salespeople in the larger retail establishments, causing discouragement to not only me, but also to employers and salespeople across the country alike. This often results in complacency and little motivation for salespeople in their lives in the workplace.
Complacency and a lack of motivation, I believe, are the two main factors contributing to poor salesmanship today. Whether it is a manager who at first does not fire a poor salesperson, or a supervisor that does not care about the performance of a sales representative, or a salesperson that fails care about sales; complacency takes a toll on all of us. Max was constantly in a mood of complacency. Not a day went by that I did not receive a complaint about his work. There was one time that Max made a duplicate of a key, and like with many of his duplicate keys, the customer brought it back because it did not work. Though this kind of event was not unusual, the customer’s reaction was. This customer, an elderly man, had tried several times to get his original key duplicated, and each time he was told that each new duplicate would work. Understandably, the customer was livid. Later that day I brought this situation up with both my managers and Max, and once again we received the typical Max response, “Oh, OK.” Max was the living breathing epitome of complacency and disconnectedness in a salesperson. Max was the kind of salesperson that never paid attention in training, or he had a look on his face that told you that what you were saying was not retained in his mind. But all this was not his fault. There was little incentive for him to do a good job. In a small town, mom-and-pop hardware store, it is difficult to find someone who will work for small town wages. Max was willing to do this because it guaranteed him a job. But in other stores there too can be little incentive, no incentive, or “so-called” incentives that have the opposite effect on employees. Sometimes this can be exactly what the salesperson wants, but if it is then he or she is like Max and is not currently fit for the world of retail sales.
In a high-speed electronics world of instant communication and satisfaction, salespeople find it hard to focus on a slower paced shopper. Politeness is fading to the background and we fail to see this happening. Even outside of the shopping arena we fail to heed Peter’s admonition in I Peter 3.8, “…be courteous:”, only proving our sin nature.
