Are We Being Served?

This article first appeared in the Southern Daily Echo:
Customer service is flavour of the month. Last week Michel Roux Jr was on BBC2 teaching belligerent teenagers how to serve fine diners. This week Channel Four has Mary Portas Secret Shopper on a mission to improve standards of service on the high street.
For a retailer, Ms Portas’ TV programmes are required viewing. She has a proven record in shop displays and has become an expert in all aspects of retailing. The trouble with the first programme was that criticising the likes of Primark, Top Shop and Pilot was like shooting fish in barrel. Seeing staff ignore customers, overhearing them chatting about their private lives- these things are hardly shock revelations. Anyone familiar with these stories experiences this every time they go in.
I suspect the problem for many low price clothing chains is that they treat their staff with contempt and that’s passed on to the customers. Mary’s mantra of ‘Smile Speak Serve’ is quite right but too simplistic. It has to be backed up with training in customer psychology so they know when and what to say and even more importantly how to listen; product knowledge so they can genuinely help fulfil the customer’s requirements; involvement in the whole business so they understand the importance of their role in it; respect so they respect the management and customers; trust so they make the right decision for each unique customer without fear of criticism.
I know Mary’s expertise is in shop design but I think she let herself be distracted by the appearance of these cheap and cheerful shops. She criticised Primark for its queues and clothes on the floor. I suspect this is a deliberate tactic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw a few items on the floor themselves each morning and deliberately create queues, because it all creates an image of fast sales from frantic bargain hunters. On the other hand, even a bargain hunter may need help in finding a particular jacket or get annoyed if there’s a queue while members of staff are standing around chatting- and that does mean lost sales.
It’s all so much easier for a small family-run shop like Your Life Your Style. My wife and sister-in-law lead the staff by example. Shoulder to shoulder with employees, they greet customers, offer help when it’s needed and care about satisfying them whether that ends in a sale or not. Staff are praised when they do well and helped to improve where necessary. But big stores can do it too- look at John Lewis or Apple.
The biggest shame attaching to the owner of Pilot was not his rude staff or his shabby shop, it was the fact that his employees had never met him. How could he expect them to care about his business?

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit At Jeanette Winterson's Small Shop

Previously my only awareness of Jeanette Winterson was as the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Now I know she's a fellow retailer and a passionate defender of the small local shop. Her article in The Observer last Sunday told how her house has a shop below called Verde which she has made into a cafe and greengrocer in keeping with its location in Spitalfields, which was once the home of London's wholesale fruit and veg market. Ms Winterson makes some interesting points about why it is difficult for small local shops to thrive. Here are a a few extracts.
On the economics of small shops: 'In Britain, running a small food shop is really hard work. We do not do as other countries in Europe and implement a sliding business rate, so Verde has to pay the same money as an estate agent or mobile phone agent.'
On the blandness of the big chains: 'I don't like the chilly world of corporate retail... I prefer individuality and eccentricity and self-determination- all the things the free market is supposed to deliver and never does, because markets soon become homogenous and anti-competitive.'
Tellingly she describes the 'new austerity Britain' as 'a country where the Post Office can't be subsidised but banks can, and where we all have to pay more, except the big businesses which are going to be allowed tax breaks to "revitalise the economy".'
Well said.

Protectionism Is Bad For Britain

Britain is a trading nation and any attempt at protectionism would backfire on us. If we stop imports, other countries will block our exports. As citizens, we would pay more and earn less. Look what happened in the sixties and seventies when trades unions sought to protect British jobs by preventing industries from modernising. We lost our competitive advantage.
Let’s continue to import mass manufactured goods cheaply and export specialised products and services for high prices. At Your Life Your Style, we stock many British made goods because they are beautifully designed and skilfully made, far better than their equivalent from overseas. Most of the other items that are made abroad more cheaply than thye could be in this country are still designed in the UK.
Free trade means we survive on our ability to be creative and competitive, something we as a nation are very good at.

Website Lets Down Mary Queen Of Shops

I was looking at the website of Yellowdoor, the retail consultancy run by Mary Portas, Queen Of Shops. I know she could transform the fortunes of the little shop my wife and I own; I know this agency is far more successful at PR than I could ever hope to be. So in a way, I feel who am I to criticise? However I have to say, their website is not very good.

See for yourself. Firstly, you have to click to get anywhere, which is always a frustration. So, click on the Retail Strategy page, though it could be any of them. The first thing you have to tackle is the tiny difficult-to-read type, made even worse because white out of brown is always going to be less easy to read that black out of white. Then there’s the counter-intuitive scrolling- the arrow at the bottom pointing down makes the page scroll to the top and the upward pointing arrow at the top takes you down. When you try to read, there are distracting photos constantly scrolling up the left hand side.

Finally perhaps the worst sin because it’s the easiest to have got right- series of typographical errors- Shopping is another scence (presumably ‘science’)… We will apply out (our) expertise. There’s no excuse for not proofing properly.

Sticking with copy but turning to the About Us page, it seems Mary Portas’ newspaper column ‘will be a launch pad for a National Shop Awards in 2006”- ‘was’ surely. You must keep your website up-to-date or your company looks inefficient and unreliable.

As happens so often, clever design has triumphed over usability. I am pretty sure that this would not be true of Yellowdoor’s retail consultancy work but a website like this just creates that little doubt.