An EXCELLENT customer service story

Whole Foods Shows you can get Something for Nothing

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve increasingly hated going to retail outlets lately, especially grocery stores. I’m always surprised at how the major chains have so many cash registers available, but only 3 or 4 open, and there are line-ups that cause 15 to 20 minute wait times.

This story isn’t entirely about wait times, however. It’s about not punishing your customers for your mistakes. If you think about this from the customer’s perspective — it’s the holiday season and you just want to get home. You hit the supermarket, pick up the 4 things you need and make a beeline for the register.

At your typical store, you get to the register and you’re told there’s a computer problem, and that it should be fixed in 10 minutes (I’m just making this part up, the story doesn’t say how long the problem lasted). You either reluctantly wait around 10 minutes, pay, and vow never to return. If you’re horribly impatient, like me at times, you drop your basket and head to the nearest competitor; again vowing never to return.

What Whole Foods did here is that they made the decision to convert these customers into customers for life, rather than deciding that the few thousand dollars worth of product was worth more.

In the long run, it makes sense. On that day, they wouldn’t have lost $4,000, but let’s say that 20% of the customers they served were not overly impressed by the service they received (which is probably a conservative estimate given that it was the holiday season, and there was a snow storm outside). I’m going to average things and say that there were 40 customers served with $100 worth of purchases. 20% of that is 8 customers.

Let’s again say that $100 is average for each of those customers when they come in once a week ($100 of groceries a week isn’t unrealistic, certainly not in my house). Those 8 customers abandoning your store forever will then cost you $800 in sales each week. That means that in only 5 weeks, you will have lost the same amount of money; only your losses will continue.

Thanks to Kim (via. Facebook) for the link.