After working in the field of retail for many years, one tends to pick up many strange idiosyncrasies and behaviours from customers that create frustrating and sometimes baffling results. I thought it might be a good idea for me to write a guide for people when they come to purchase goods in a retail environment.
In this guide I will give some of my own perspective on certain situations which tend to reduce the flow of the sales process. As a customer, you may be totally oblivious to some of your actions in regards to how they affect said sales process.
Be aware of your surroundings, and have some common sense:
If you want to make sure you get the best possible service, when you walk into a store, observe your surroundings. Take into account things such as how busy the store is, the time of day and the number of staff on duty. You cannot truly expect to get the same attention from staff if they are currently serving someone else. If there are people banked up at the registers and most of the staff are either putting sales through or are currently serving someone else, hiding down the back of the store will not get the attention of the salesperson.
As a customer, it might be nice to expect the same level of service regardless of the circumstances in the store, but unfortunately it is totally unrealistic. A salesperson can only truly serve one person well at a time. A good salesperson will manage the time they have with a customer to an appropriate time scale depending on how busy it is, but many types of transactions cannot be performed in 2 minutes. Things such as returns, lay-buys, service repairs, very large sales, sales that involve finance or other special payments and other customer concerns often take many times longer than the average sale.
How would you feel if you were purchasing something worth a few thousand dollars and the salesperson left you every thirty seconds whenever another customer wanted attention? I personally would leave the store. Large sales do get the priority not simply because it is good for the stores sales figures but because when spending large amounts of money, we all like to be assured we are making the correct decision. It is this assurance which takes time.
If the salesperson has left another customer to help you, try to keep it short, or if you have a more difficult problem, tell the salesperson this so that they can finish serving their current customer. This may seem overly gracious, but again, put yourself in the shoes of the customer who the salesperson left? Would you want to wait while another customer who came into the store after you got served?
Any time that is busy there is always someone I can just see down the back of the store looking very impatient simply staring at me with no other indications that they need assistance. If I have customers backed up three deep at the register, I’m not going to leave them to run down there and help you out. Or often if I am getting a product for a customer from the back room I have people asking if I’m free. If I was free, would I be walking from back room with a product in my hand towards the counter? It is incredible (and depressing) how many people leave their common sense at the door when walking into a store.
The best way to get help from a salesperson, if there are none free is to wait at the counter. The counter is the busiest part in most retail stores and also the place you are more likely to find a salesperson that can help you. Standing at the back of the store and staring at a salesperson will not get their attention. And for gods sake, do not yell out, gesture, click, whistle or wave for a salespersons attention. This is just plain rudeness and is a sure fire way to void any favours that you may have received.
When you are being served, try and stick to the subject. The salesperson really doesn’t need to know in detail what programs you are intending to watch on your new television. They don’t need to know about what your friend said to you on the phone last night or what you think about the current political situation in the US. These details not only waste the salespersons time, they can make it more difficult for them to focus on the problem at hand.
Also, keep the conversation polite and friendly, but be pithy and concise if possible. Try to convey only the relevant details about a problem you have. This will save you time, and the salesperson time.
Do your research:
The salesperson you speak to may know a lot about a few things or a few things about a lot. Very rarely will they know anything more than basic selling points about the majority of the products they are selling. This can lead to a) Frustration on behalf of the customer, because let’s face it, you want all of your questions answered quickly and concisely, and b) possible incorrect information being given to the customer, either by simple mistake or by the salesperson speculating about something so that they can give an answer rather than appearing ignorant. Of course, the salesperson could simply check the details but unfortunately, with staff levels in the majority of stores stretched so thinly, shortcuts tend to be taken regardless of whether it is the right thing to do.
So what can be done to rectify this situation. Well, two things, one realistic and one not. Firstly, the one that is only practical for stores in fantasy land, is for the salesperson to spend any free time he or she has learning every intimate detail about every single product. The reason this doesn’t work? Think about how many different products exist in your average (say) electronics retail shop. The number is about twice as large as that. When you, as a customer ask a salesperson something very specific about a product, for example the number of buttons on the remote control of a particular television, you are basically saying that you expect the salesperson to know that level of detail on every product. And not just that detail, but every detail that is that specific. Obviously, that can’t scale.
The only real solution to this problem is for the customer to have done their homework. In this day and age with the internet so available, it is quite simply lazy on the part of the customer not to have done at least fundamental research on the product they are thinking of purchasing. The higher the value of the product, the more research that should be done. This not only takes the burden off the salesperson somewhat, it also helps the customer because the internet is full of reviews and opinions on just about everything. The salesperson is there to assist you with your purchase, not tell you what to buy. The assistance may include giving an opinion of a particular item, but as a customer, it is in your best interest to get as many points of view as possible, and the internet is the best possible place for such things.
Another problem I encounter as a sales person are people who want the salesperson to teach them about a particular product in detail. For example, I often get customers who come in who have heard the word ‘MP3’ and want me to tell them all about it. In most case a simple ‘MP3 is a way for computers to store music’ will suffice, but in many cases with new technologies, I find that I am explaining simple concepts over and over again when the customer could simply have done a google search for ‘What is MP3’.
Salespeople are humans too! (or, Remember your manners):
Nobody likes to be treated like shit. Plain and simple. I have, however, come to accept that several times a day I have to converse with people who have no common courtesy, or manners. Saying hello and smiling will instantly give a good impression, and lightens the mood of the conversation between you and the salesperson. If you are terse and rude, you are less likely to be done any favours. A simple ‘thank you’ can often make all the difference. Many people think that because they are giving someone money i exchange for goods it gives them the right to treat someone as sub-human. I encounter this kind of behaviour daily. A salesperson is a person just like you, trying to make a living.
I do not have a photographic memory. I cannot remember when you came in two months ago and I do not remember what you bought or what problem I helped you serve. So please do not pick up the conversation where we left off because I will simply have no idea of what you are talking about.
Also, this final thing may be just one of my own neuroses, but if you are talking to a salesperson, do not eat something. It is one thing that really grinds my gears. I once had a customer that walked up, took a bite of his mars bar before even saying hello, and proceeded to eat it while asking my advice on some product or other. He chomped away as i tried to ask him questions to try and help him, and almost as if he had intended it, he finished his mars bar at the exact same time as I had finished with him. I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from saying anything.
You have no right to a discount:
At least in my part of the world, you don’t expect to get a discount without a very good reason. In my opinion, a good reason is imperfect stock, old stock, or if you are buying a large number of items. If you simply ask for a discount with no other reason than you want one, you are almost certainly not going to get it. At least a dozen times a day I get asked by customers for discounts on things that are active, already on sale, or already discounted. Why would I drop the price on something such as this? If I reduce the profit margin on something by 50%, I have to sell twice as many. That means that if I refuse to discount then as many as 50% of the people who approach me to buy the product can tell me where to shove it and I will still make the same amount of profit for the company. It’s not that hard really. I’m not going to work twice as hard for the same figures.
After sales support over the phone:
In my job, I often deal with people over the phone who need a little bit (or sometimes a big bit) of help with their product when they get it home. If you need me to step you through a process, let me do so. Do not do something else and not tell me. I can’t see what’s going on on the other end of the telephone, so I must be able to have a clear and accurate mental picture of the situation. It’s in your best interest to simply do exactly as I say and answer my questions concisely even if you think what I’m doing is wrong. If you needed to call me for help it is likely that you don’t know what to do.
Also, if you do call for support, don’t keep passing the phone to somebody else. Just today I had to deal with a couple over the phone who kept switching the phone between them. The husband seemed to think his way was right, so no matter what I said he simply set up his TV the way he thought it would go (Which was obviously not the right way because he had to call me!).
So what does it all mean?
Basically, this was meant as a bit of a guide on how to be my dream customer. If everyone followed my advice, my job would be a dream. If you are reading this as a customer, perhaps next time you walk into a retail shop of some kind, you can take something away from this and perhaps the salesperson you deal with will have a slightly nicer day because of it.
The first CD that I ever purchased was ‘Unit – Rebooted’ by Regurgitator. I was in year 7 at high school, and ‘Polyestergirl’ and ‘!(The song formally known as)’ were being played all over the place.It was a much larger affair back in those days to purchase a CD. Having no job meant that $25 was quite a large sum of money. An amount that could only be acquired by accruing pocket moneys for a period of time or doing lots and lots of odd jobs.I don’t remember exactly how I managed to get the money together, but I do remember not knowing whether to buy a CD or (lol) cassette. At the time I had a hand-me-down CD player that couldn’t actually play CDs. The radio worked. The Tape player worked. The CD player didn’t work and had to be taped shut, because the latch was broken. This wasn’t the only problem. Even if the lid was tapped down, it still didn’t work. I could hear something moving whenever I tried to use it, but it never worked.So it was with the knowledge that I may not be able to play it on my own stereo that I still decided to buy the CD. I went to a number of shops, looking around for the best price. As mentioned earlier, the difference between $30 and $25 was heaps in those days. I eventually settled on JB Hifi, as they were the cheapest.Then the next choice: Which colour? You see, Unit Rebooted was a combination CD and CDRom with video clips on it. It was released after the initial release of Unit which had a silver background with a yellow circle as the cover. Unit rebooted came with many different coloured circles on the cover. There was orange, blue, green and I’m sure may others. I took an Orange one, but I cannot remember what motivated me to do so.After purchasing this disc of aluminium foil and polycarbonate I caught the bus home. I arrived and went straight to my bedroom. I remember looking at the CD player. I put the disc inside. I taped the lid shut. Nothing. Just the same strange sound of movement it always had. Slightly saddend, but increasingly determined to prove myself better this inanimate object I looked inside. The laser was there, sitting at one end of its track. Well, to read the whole disc the laser had to go along the track, Right? And well what harm could come from moving it across by hand Right? So I did just that.And then I put the CD inside. And it played. And it was as if the angels themselves created the music that washed over my ears.
The No.9 