The Receipt

I once watched a customer reduce one of my sales assistants to tears on the shop floor, and then turn to her manager for backup.

My assistant was twenty-two.

The manager had about two seconds to decide what to do with that, and whatever she decided, everybody standing nearby was going to read it as the rule.

The Phrase

I run retail, and I will not tell my team that “the customer is always right”. It is the quickest way to teach good people that their dignity is negotiable.

You see it framed in staff rooms. Somebody in her first week reads it and takes it in, and nobody ever explains to her what it really means.

It reads like a promise to the customer. It works as an instruction to my staff, and the instruction is “whatever happens, you are the one who is wrong”.

No manager ever has to say it out loud. The wall says it for her.

My own opinion is that this is not the customer's fault, and it is not the manager's either. It is mine.

I let that sentence stand. For years, in my own stores. Nobody made me leave it up there. I left it because it was easy, and because I was never going to be the one standing at the till on the day somebody decided to use it.

Listening

A customer is always worth listening to, and always owed attention. When we have got something wrong, they are owed a fix, and we cover it without making them ask twice. That is the whole job, and there is no version of this business without it.

Most people who behave badly in a shop are not cruel. Something has gone wrong in their week, and the shop is the one place where somebody is obliged to stand there and listen to them.

I believe all of that. It still changes nothing on the floor. Somebody has to stand there and take it, and it is never me.

Two Seconds

She apologised to the customer.

Over the assistant's head, in front of everybody, in the voice managers use when they want a scene finished. Then she offered the customer something to make it right, and the customer left satisfied, and the floor was back to normal inside a minute.

I understood exactly why. Siding with the customer was the quickest way to stop the noise, everything she had ever been taught about service pointed the same way, and nothing I had written down told her there was another option.

And I had nothing better to offer that afternoon. Standing there, I did not know what she should have done instead. I only worked it out afterwards, when nothing was at stake.

Everybody on that floor understood what had just been settled, and that it had been settled against one of our own.

Permission

Since that afternoon every manager who works for me has had one rule.

When a customer crosses from difficult into cruel, you are allowed to take our person's side. Out loud. While it is happening, in front of the customer and in front of everybody else on the floor.

And you will not be in trouble with me for it. Not if the customer asks to speak to somebody above you. Not if she writes to me herself.

That last part is the rule. Everything before it is a sentiment.

Managers always ask what they are actually meant to say, which is a fair question, because nobody can work out what “take our person's side” means while a customer is shouting at them. So I give them the sentence. “I am going to ask you to speak to her differently, or I will deal with this myself.” That is all of it. It does not have to be said loudly, and nobody is being asked to leave. The customer can change her tone and carry on shopping.

The rule gets tested at my desk.

Sooner or later a customer writes to me about a manager who did exactly this. The letter is calm and well argued, and it arrives on a bad morning. Nothing in it looks anything like the afternoon it is describing. That is where the rule either holds or stops being a rule. The manager did exactly what I asked of her, and she has no part in what I decide about it.

Braver

A team who knows you will stand in front of them does not get softer. It gets braver.

I have written before about walking into one of my stores and knowing the week has gone wrong before anybody tells me. A braced floor is one of the things I am reading. It is slower and quieter than it has any reason to be. Nobody working on it could tell me why, and nobody has decided to give less. They are keeping a little back for the afternoon they get handed over to somebody having a bad day.

The customer learned something in those two seconds too. A woman who finds that raising her voice produces a manager and an apology will use it again, in the same shop, quite possibly on the same assistant. Every floor has two or three of them. My team can name them years before I can, and the sentence on the wall is what trained them.

The rule costs customers and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A customer who has been asked to speak differently to a shop assistant does not come back. What it buys is how long good people stay, which is the most expensive number in this business, and what they will do for a customer who is merely difficult. Side with the loudest customer to keep the peace and you keep that customer, and slowly lose the people who made the place worth walking into.

The Line

Difficult and cruel do not come with a line drawn between them. Most of what happens on a floor sits in the middle, where somebody is rude because something has genuinely gone wrong and nobody has fixed it yet. In that middle my own judgement is not worth much.

I have got it wrong both ways. Once I backed a manager who stepped in before anything had really happened. Another time I stood and watched and told myself it had not quite tipped over. It had.

There is no test for this. There is only a preference, and mine is to be early. Being early costs me a customer, and I see that at the end of the month. The other way teaches a young woman what she is worth here, and nobody sends me a figure for that.

The Receipt

A receipt is not a licence to humiliate my team. A young woman in tears on the shop floor, in front of everybody, because a stranger had a bad morning and a piece of paper in her bag. I will take the lost sale every time.

If you have been the manager for those two seconds, I would like to know which way you went, and not the version you would put in a report. Those replies become the next pieces.

This is UNTOLD. Where leadership sounds like a real voice.