Eventually we made it to the till, handed over the money and had our receipt stamped. Now the checkout person made a call to alert the store room that we were coming to collect the game.
We dashed over to the glass enclosed storeroom and pressed the bell.
Inside there were three people. One on the phone, and the other two chatting, leaning against a table, arms crossed. One of them caught my eye and returned that dead eye stare that you get on the London Underground. After 5 minutes of waiting the cumulative experience finally got to me and I went over to the storeroom window and hammered on it, literally beat it as hard as I could. My son was dying of that acute embarrassment of a child whose parent has just stepped outside the acceptable social norms.
In no hurry at all one of the sales “assistants” wandered out with my game. He knew what it was, it had been to hand all the time, he was not at all apologetic, and did not appear to think my behaviour odd. We took the game and ran to the exit.
All of this had become the stuff of family legend and I’d quit bothering about it until an incident the other night.
I had been invited to an event at a local business school and during drinks met one of the MBA students who would be graduating this year. As part of the school’s work experience program they had been placed at another branch of the same toy megastore. Not only that, he was proud to tell me that he would be taking up a store management position in September.
“Do you know what the customer experience is like at this shop?” I asked incredulously. “It’s crap.” “It’s not like that when you work there” he answered, “I’ve met the CEO lots of times and he’s really good. Anyway it’s the parents that hate it: the kids love it”. Good grief, I thought, so the kids pay for the toys and only scream when I’m in the shop because they like the acoustics? I suggested to him that the next time he met the CEO he should take him by the arm to the nearest store and have him enjoy the customer experience.
How could an MBA student, who had just spent 2 years having his head stuffed with the importance of customer care and customer retention, with corporate culture and employee motivation, with Ps and Rs and best practice, how could this person willingly, happily, join a company whose customer messaging would be best summed up as “Pants 2 You”?
I know it is obvious to you, but it is worth repeating: if you want to offer an attractive product range, and market it in a way to which your customers are going respond positively, then you are going to need to empathise with your customers. You need to understand what is important to them and modify your offering accordingly. Supermarkets understand this, and let you know with announcements such as “would all qualified checkout staff attend the checkouts immediately”. At Pants 2 You the implicit announcement was “would all customers please understand that polishing our nails is more important than serving you”.
And what of the game? Well, a few weeks after the window-banging incident my son came to me and said, “Dad, you know that game, well it’s got a fault and after a certain stage it stops working. I think there is a problem with the disk, we’re going to have to take it back”.
Arrghh! If only we could visit the store in Grand Theft Auto IV!
See the follow up post: The road to salvation for “Pants 2 You”
My immediate question is: Which store are you refering to? In anticipation of how unfair of me it was to ask that questions, amybe you could just tell me the city which it was based :)
I have to say that this is not unusual in the UK, we’re so accomadating of poor service it’s unreal.
Thanks for the comment.
I’ve masked the various characters in the story, but I can assure you that it is all true.
I guess you don’t have kids because if you had you’d know the store – I’ve heard similar tales from others.
Someone was ranting on the television the other day about how bad the experience was of visiting an IKEA store. I’ve had poor experiences there too, but less to do with staff attitude, more to do with the place not being set up for the numbers of customers trying to use it. I ordered £45 of shelves from them over the internet and grudgingly paid the £35 delivery charge. Anything not to have to visit the store!
I feel that disconnect in many places… at the grocery store where the cashiers are dead behind the eyes and don’t want to engage you, at one of the local comic book shops where it feels like I’m intruding on a private club when I come in to pick up something… It’s amazing what an impact an employee can have on a customer–but much more amazing to me, in situations like you describe, that business owners can’t always see what’s right before their eyes!
Thanks Chris.
You are right, it is amazing that the company obviously know what the customer experience of their store is, and yet appear to do nothing to fix it. Why would they act like that? It is completely irrational.
I’ve spent ages since I wrote the piece thinking about how I would help them change things and turn it around into a customer / kid focussed environment. If they want to contact me, it would be a fun project. But they won’t will they? Because ultimately, they don’t care. That is the only explanation. And we should vote with our feet and our wallets…
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If they want to learn (and this questionable willingness is the crux of the matter) how to run an engaging toy store which is a fun experience for kids and responsible adults (!) alike, they need to take a look at Hamley’s in London. Its like visiting a theme park and I actually departed from their Regent Street store having spent less than at the box office at Alton Towers and was rewarded with smiling youngsters instead of queasy tummies due to over-consumption of ‘fizzy pop’.
What puzzles me is that ‘Pants-2-U’ originates in the US, the homeland of customer service. Something gone lost in trans-atlantic-translation?
Thanks for the comment Babs.
You are so right; the difference between a positive customer experience and a negative one is so huge. Do they not realise that you, the customer, walk out of their store and say to your friends “it was great, you should go”?
Sadly there are lots stores which fail and probably won’t make it through the recession because of that.