How to ensure customers in a queue remain loyal
How do you want your customers to feel about your brand when they leave your store? Experience is important if you want them to feel good and loyal to it.
When a customer enters your shop, chooses something and joins the queue, they expect to be served. They have queued, the person in front of them has been served and then the assistant answers the phone. The customer then must wait until the phone call has finished.
This is one of my pet peeves and I think you’ll find it is one for many consumers too.
Shop staff who stop serving customers in a queue to answer the phone instead. That’s rude. When I ask my followers what annoys them in store this always comes up.
Quite simply someone on the phone may be a potential customer. The person in front of you is an actual customer, right now.
Given the times that I hear this as a complaint about customer service, this happens more often than you would think. “I am standing in front of the person about to serve me or even serving me, who then picks up the phone to answer a call.” This is so rude. The person in front of you was before the person on the phone and so, in fact, so were all the people queuing!
It costs five times more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one. So, even with bad manners aside, it is not good business sense to prioritise a telephone call over someone you should be serving, right in front of you.
How to annoy customers in a queue
What could/should be done to improve things for customers in store?
It is highly likely that the call is not urgent. It can wait.
Some policies for retailers state that telephone calls must be answered within a certain number of rings. But perhaps the person ringing will think “Oh, they must be serving a customer, I’ll ring back!”
No store should have only one member of staff, where another member of staff couldn’t answer the phone. Perhaps have a number for emergencies which is only given to certain people and should ONLY be used in urgent cases?
What if the phone call ends up being a long one? You risk the customer just dumping their shopping and leaving!
Aside from serving customers, it isn’t safe to have only one member of staff in a store on their own! So, there should always be someone available who can answer the phone.
If staff are taking calls instead of serving customers in your store (s) you need to change the processes and ensure that your staff know the procedure too. For example, phone calls should be transferred to the back office or elsewhere within the store, not to the customer-facing staff at the tills. Or have at least two members of staff on the tills. But if you do this there should only be one queue so people still feel they will be served by the other person.
Ensure that staff know that the priority is always the customer in front of them. This way they feel valued.
See business posts for me on gaining and retaining customers.
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