It wasn’t so much the $25 as it was the principle of the situation. And I hope it served as a learning opportunity for the folks who run the new Walgreen’s that opened recently in my neighborhood.
I was one of the first customers to enter the doors of the new store. I did so with the intent of moving my prescription account from another drugstore to Walgreen’s. Now, normally, drugstores offer customers a $25 credit when they move their accounts, so I asked a Walgreen employee if they were making that offer. The response was that it was going to do so, but not that day. A $25 coupon would be featured in an advertisement in the local newspaper in two weeks. (Four weeks later, I still hadn’t seen that ad in the paper.)
“I’m here now and would like to move my account and get the $25 credit,” I told him. “Can you make an empowered decision and do that for me?”
The answer was, “No,” but she said she would ask the pharmacy manager to talk with me. Within a few minutes the pharmacy manager appeared with the assistant and district managers in tow. They, too, said they could not issue a $25 credit for moving my account until the ad came out.
Now, some people say I’m cheap, and they aren’t off the mark in that assessment. But I also enjoy pushing employees of businesses I frequent to test them on their customer service skills and to determine whether or not they are empowered. In this case, even though everyone I dealt with was kind and patient, not one of them could make an empowered decision.
In a perfectly empowered world, here is what should have occurred.
The manager would have said, “We are not offering that promotional deal at this time, but because you are here now and we really want to have you as a customer, I’m going to give you the $25 credit to move your prescription account to Walgreen’s.”
What these folks – and, I’m sure upper management at Walgreen’s – don’t realize is that empowering frontline employees will wow the customer, lock him in, and move him to a higher level of loyalty. And that translates to increased sales and profits.
Research shows that customers who have a problem with a company and have that problem solved quickly and to their satisfaction are more loyal than customers who have never had a problem with the company. In other words, problems are opportunities. But if you don’t give your employees the authority to solve those problems, the opportunities are lost.
You must train your employees and then trust them to do the right thing – for the customer and the company. If the folks at Walgreen’s had given me the $25 credit, I would have transferred my prescription on the spot, and they could have added my name to their customer roster.
Instead, I was the fish that got away. How many other fish did they have on the hook and let get away?
When you empower your employees, you set your organization apart from the competition. And when you do that, you not only keep current customers, you attract new customers.
John Tschohl is an international service strategist. He has written several books on customer service, including “Achieving Excellence Through Customer Service,” “The Customer is Boss,” and “Ca$hing In: Make More Money, Get a Promotion, Love Your Job.”
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