Mary Portas Secret Shopper episode two: The customer service lessons

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While she may have shrugged off last week’s £3 top for a £3,000 leather sofa, the approach for the series has already been established. Using secret filming techniques she exposes some of the common flaws among a few of the household names in the sector: the impersonal warehouse settings, the hard sell, promotion and price promises which are, at best, confusing.

 

Inside a few, breathless minutes she declared the industry as "one of the worst examples of poor customer service in all my experience of the retail industry".

 

It was easy to see what she meant. All the stores were interchangeable, bland and mundane creating an uninspiring customer experience.

 

Likewise the staff who are robotic and commission driven. At CSL sofas, this week’s ‘victim’, sales staff were paid a £16 a day basic wage and were set daily targets enabling them to top this up with commission. The news that the best performing salesman at the company’s Rotherham store earned £57,000 last year, plus the gift of a Rolex watch (complete with meteorite) from the chain’s owner, is an indication of how highly pressured the sales techniques in the industry are.

 

In stark comparison to last week, the staff were highly motivated and CSL’s managing director, Jason Tyldesley got the message – unlike the opening episode’s guinea pig boss. However, like the stores, the customer experience was too uniform and meaningless, cue undercover filming across a number of retail units with the staff all literally word perfect.

The outcome of this approach was that once the supporting script was removed staff struggled to engage with customers.

 

 

In a welcome innovation to the series’ structure, a number of hand-picked customers were brought in and the team challenged to talk to them to really understand what they needed.

 

The results were hilarious as the team saw what happened when they took the chosen sofas back to the customers’ homes. One sofa didn’t fit with the décor – “It was the only colour we had in stock.” While it is doubtful that there was room to swing the proverbial feline once an enormous leather leviathan had been squeezed into two hairdressers’ minimalist living room.

 

The solution? Ms Portas introduced a style station where customers could discuss their needs, and lifestyle themed room settings. She also persuaded MD Jason to do away with all the price promises and promotional signs. In their place came a single, best price promise – and no Boxing Day sale.

 

As last week, what raised the programme above its counterparts was Ms Portas’ passion for changing the mindset of the store chain. She was visibly upset to discover that there was a website dedicated to complaints form CSL’s customers - apparently a first in the industry.

 

The reaction of MD Jason was interesting, and perhaps typical of similar organisations. Because he couldn’t deal with the complaints face to face, he didn’t know how to handle this customer channel. He tried to deny the veracity of the complaints, claimed they had another agenda etc. He was lost. Our hostess got him to accept that these were legitimate views which had to be addressed if the chain was to improve its customer service reputation.

 

In the changing world of social media this is becoming increasingly important. Research from the ICS’s UKCSI, the annual survey of 26,000 consumers gauging customer service in the UK, found that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations on social media compared to only 18% who trust advertising.

 

The result? After a sticky start to the traditional furniture store post-Christmas sale, including some resistance from customers that expected a sale, their Christmas/ New Year income was up 30%.

 

The staff at the Rotherham store loved the new ideas and Jason promised to roll it out across the chain at a cost of over £500,000. My only question mark is that it remained unclear at the end of the programme whether the staff were still selling what was best for their customer, or best for their commission.

 

Duncan Baker is director of strategic marketing and communications at the Institute of Customer Service.