Focus on your customers
Chavez asks his employees to make eye contact each time they interact with a customer, so they don’t miss his or her face.
“I encourage my people to do that honestly, sincerely and naturally,” he says. “It’s been working since day one, and it’s working today.”
It’s a small request, but it’s huge in that it gets employees out of their own world and forces them to focus on the customer, which is one of the keys to Mi Pueblo’s growth over the years.
Chavez says that the first step to focusing on your customers begins with recognizing the extent of your knowledge. While he understood his customers’ needs better than the competition, he still needed to get to know them as individuals to make sure he really understood them on a deeper level.
“I began with the premise that I don’t know the information that I need to know in order to go out there and do business,” he says.
You have to realize you don’t know everything about your customers, and the only way to learn is to ask.
“How are you going to do that — by listening and observing and asking them a lot of questions and telling them, ‘I’m here to fulfill a need for you. I’m here to serve you. How can I serve you better? Everyone began with the same piece of meat. How can I put this piece of meat in your hand, onto your table in such a way that represents more value to you?’”
He also makes sure that when he goes to his office or leaves the stores that he walks through the main sales floor so he can see what’s going on and talk to customers.
“The best place to be is where the action is taking place — on the sales floor,” he says. “The worst place to be is sitting in the chair, behind the desk.”
He’s gotten great feedback by doing this. One woman pulled him aside and explained that the employees at the meat counter were throwing the meat to each other and flopping it on the counter for her, and it was disrespectful. She went on to tell him that this is the meat she will be preparing for her table at home, and she would like it handled with more respect. Chavez agreed.
“I tell my employees, ‘Imagine that this meat is a gift, and the only thing that is missing is the [tag] that says this gift is coming from me to yourself,’” he says.
It may just be one complaint from one woman, but you never know how many customers have felt the same way and not spoken up. And it’s a simple change.
“You have to use your judgment; you have to use your common sense,” Chavez says. … “You don’t have to invent anything. Everything’s already created. You don’t have to invent the wheel. There are so many processes and behaviors out there in use today by others and used in the past by others. You have to grab them and put them in practice.”
And you have to communicate to your customers about the things that you change on their behalf.
“Bring them and make them part of the change,” he says “You have to create trust and respect and you have to tell them that everything you’re doing here is with the intention to provide that environment to them. In that process, they will tell you what they want, what they don’t like or could be offensive to them.”
And even when customers don’t have complaints and instead offer compliments, he still remembers to focus on them.
“Usually, the biggest compliment you hear is when customers tell you, ‘Thank you — thank you for what you’re doing for me,’” he says. “And I will tell them, ‘On the contrary, you’re the one who’s making this business successful and the reason for our existence is you, and you’re the one that keeps Mi Pueblo growing — it’s not me.
“Seeing it that way and approaching it that way, and then being accessible to your customers, that’s where the customer continues to see you as the same human being you want to be seen as. No difference.”
