Customer Interaction That Went Wrong
A customer related this story about how his son had done a poor job dealing with a customer. The customer came in for a refund. The item was fine but the customer had trashed the box. The son and the customer had a heated exchange over the refund. The son relented and gave the customer a refund. Not only had the son taken back an item that was going to be hard to sell with a trashed box, he had made the customer mad enough so that he wasn't ever going to return. When you are dealing with this sort of situation, you have to make up your mind early on what you are going to do. If you are going to give a refund, smile and make the customer happy. If you are not going to give a refund, hold your ground and be as pleasant as possible. Accept the fact that you are likely to lose them as a customer. However, this is the sort of customer that you would prefer goes to your competitors. He will cause them aggravation and money.
Labels: Refunds
Reliability and Backups
Lately there has been heavy flooding in parts of TN and KY. I happened to talk with a store manager in that area during the flooding. She said that the electricity had been out part of the day and they couldn't run invoices on their store POS system. Moreover, they couldn't price most items in the store. Essentially, they couldn't run any cash sales. They were reduced to writing hand tickets for charge sales only listing the customer name, quantities and part numbers. These hand tickets were run later. That got me to thinking about the importance of reliability. Some 30+ years ago when personal computers were just starting to be widely available, the systems were not reliable. The systems ran on floppy disks. The diskettes and floppy drives themselves went bad. If users did not make good backups, then it was almost a sure thing that they would soon face serious data loss. People knew backups were important. About the same time as the flooding in TN and KY an associate upgraded a customer's computer. They have been using our system for over 20 years and have never been down. Here is a situation where increased reliability might make serious data loss more likely. It is hard to convince somebody that hasn't had a computer crash in over 20 years that it is important to make good backups. We knew that we had a potential problem with people forgetting about their backups. Our solution was to put the date of the last good backup on the main computer screen. It is visible every day for most of the day. The user has to choose to ignore the warning. It is like your gas gauge flashing a warning on low fuel. Ignore this warning at your own peril.
Labels: backups, reliable computers, Store POS System
Corporate Control Runs Amuck
I was watching the boob tube last week and saw a segment on McDonald's. They had an interview with the founder, Ray Kroc, filmed many years ago. I found it interesting that he said that all of the good ideas for McDonald's came from the franchisees not from within McDonald's corporate. I remember a Radio Shack representative telling me something similar. He also said that some of the most innovative ideas in selling came from franchisees. Given that I am surprised that corporations continue to try to gain more control over their franchises. The corporations should make it as easy as possible for their franchisees to run their franchises as they see fit. One of the most blatant examples involves a store front sign. A gentleman was negotiating with a corporation about buying a franchise for a parts store. The corporation was adamant that they wanted the gentleman to spend $20,000 for a store front sign. I kept thinking that there must be some sort of mistake. Maybe the sign was $2,000 or even $200 instead of $20,000. Why would an sane person want to spend $20,000 for a sign for a business that people seek out because the business has items that are often not widely available? The negotiations did not go far. The gentleman in question knew that one of the most successful franchises for that corporation did not have one of those $20,000 signs. In fact they did not have any sign at all. I continue to wonder why the corporation didn't send representatives to the successful store to study why they are successful. The corporation could then put out a pamphlet of ideas from a very successful store. The other franchise stores could look at the pamphlet and adopt any ideas that they thought might work for them. I also feel sorry for the corporate representative trying to sell the idea of an expensive sign. Down deep inside he must know that the sign he is trying to sell is good advertising for the corporation but is almost surely not money well spent for the store. He is having to live a lie and is on the road to becoming a burnt out employee.
Labels: corporate control, franchise, Store front sign
