Something wasn’t quite right last Saturday when we went to our nearest shopping centre to find inspiration for those remaining ‘difficult’ Christmas presents.

Something wasn’t quite right last Saturday when we went to our nearest shopping centre to find inspiration for those remaining ‘difficult’ Christmas presents.

It wasn’t that on the approach the traffic was unusually light for a pre-Christmas weekend, or that parking was easy, or that we didn’t have to fight our way through crowds of shoppers when we got into the centre.

No, what really struck us was after visiting probably the fifth store and noticing that all the shop staff had clearly been on customer service training.

And not just the bland and obvious variety of ‘can I help you’ service. This was really good service – polite, helpful and appropriate. Brilliant. More importantly, it was being delivered by a whole range of stores, some of which you might not normally associate with good service. We thought we had just maybe struck lucky, but friends concurred.

We all might be deluding ourselves and these were exceptional experiences rather than the norm, but I’d prefer to think that improving customer service really has moved up the agenda. It has certainly been talked about long enough. 

Whatever the end result of Christmas 2011, it will go down as one of the toughest and hardest fought for many a year. All the tools in the retailers’ box will have been used but, along with product and price, creating an outstanding customer experience through great service has to be a key differentiator.

With every retailer now focused on the prospects for 2012 it would seem likely to assume that there are going to be no helpful hand-ups from the economy. In one of his recent Financial Times columns, serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson noted that businesses are now facing the fourth year since the downturn began. However, he went on to argue that for entrepreneurs – or any businesses – these conditions are unleashing highly inventive solutions to problems.

For retailers, this can also mean rediscovering the core drivers of the business, such as service, but all the time trying to find a new and effective way of approaching them. On a straw poll of one, we may be seeing this being implemented already.

  • Ian McGarrigle, Director, World Retail Congress