A few years ago, Tom Heinen found himself heading to Dick’s Sporting Goods to look for a last-minute Christmas gift on Dec. 23.
What the co-president of Heinen’s found when he got there was the best parking spaces were occupied by employee vehicles. But when he entered the store, there was no help to be found and the stock was sparse. Making his way to the checkout, there were two employees nearby, but neither seemed all that interested in helping him.
“Not either of those employees showed any sense of urgency to wait on me and get me out of the store,” he says. “I thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’”
Fast-forward one year. Once again, Heinen was at Dick’s for a last-minute gift. His first thought: “Great, here we go again.” But this time, things were different.
An employee immediately asked him if he could help him find something. Surprised, he said yes and told him he was looking for a baseball bat. The employee proceeded to tell him what aisle it was in and explain that the store had different types and if he didn’t find what he was looking for, to let him know.
Skeptical and scarred by too many bad retail experiences, he headed to the aforementioned aisle, and sure enough, it was right where the employee said. When he made his way to the checkout area, there were now two televisions showing CNN and there were two people at the register, both highly engaged, who quickly checked him out in half the time from the prior year.
While he was relieved to avoid a repeat of his prior negative experience, there was something disturbing about the rapid change.
The problem for Heinen was that he didn’t see Dick’s as being a customer-service-centered business, but in just a year, it had completely changed his experience.
“If Dick’s, who isn’t even focusing on this, can get there, we have to do something differently,” he says. “That’s when we started to make a decision to distinguish ourselves on customer service at an entirely different level.”
It’s not that customer service wasn’t always the focus of Heinen’s; in fact, it’s always been one of the grocery retailer’s primary differentiators. But what the Dick’s experience showed was that if even the big box retailers could deliver a positive customer experience, Heinen’s was going to have to take the service provided by its 2,500 people up another notch.
And this is proven by the store’s own customer surveys that indicate a satisfied customer isn’t really all that loyal but a highly satisfied customer is.
“The value of highly satisfied customers, statistically, is that they’re virtually guaranteed to come back within two weeks,” he says. “A satisfied customer, the number is like 62 percent, so there’s this huge difference between having a satisfied and highly satisfied customer.
“You want to have everybody in that top box — highly satisfied — because they’re very subject to defection if they’re not.”
The challenge is, how do you go from being good at customer service — yielding satisfied customers — to being great at customer service — yielding those coveted loyal, highly satisfied customers?
It’s not the cost of a can of green beans. It’s not the color scheme in the deli department. It’s not whether the box of stuffing is on the top shelf or the bottom.
“If you really want to have a successful company, you have to have highly satisfied associates, which leads to highly satisfied customers, which leads to profit, which allows you to continually reinvest in the company, which includes the people,” Heinen says.
