Magazines Archives - 2007 February

Retailers in Singapore have been on a mission since the Prime Minister’s clarion call for better service in 2005. Almost a year-and-a-half later, human resource (HR) and training experts say the key to better service may not lie so much in training programmes but a better, more involved working environment. Angeline Yeo reports on how Singapore is building a service culture.

For the past year, the retail industry in Singapore has been busying itself with training and reward programmes to better service standards in the country. While improvements have been recorded in various mystery-shopper programmes, experts say much more can be done to ensure better service excellence, and not just through training.

“We need to focus on building a service culture,” says Zack Bana, director of Beacon Consulting. The 10-year-old company provides training and management consultancy solutions, with special focus on service quality in retail. Creating a culture of service ranks high on Beacon’s priority list. Beacon believes that the first and probably most important step to creating this culture of service starts at recruitment.

“One of the challenges HR departments face is getting the right manpower,” observes Bana.

He believes that retailers are more likely to attain top-notch service when they hire staff who are interested in customer orientation from the get-go. To assist them, Beacon is in the midst of developing a profile for retail, to be launched in the first quarter of this year. The profile aims to help retailers in the mid-mass and luxury categories identify people with a passion for retailing and customer service.

“[Good customer service] is a balance of passion and skill. Retailers whose staff are already customeroriented will, through sufficient coaching, be able to achieve first-rate [level of] customer satisfaction,” he says.

A second way to create a service culture in a retail organisation is to provide training for the full process — from strategic managers to procurement personnel and staff on the floor. Often, retailers send frontline staff for training in service excellence, forgetting that in order to properly service the customers they have to depend on their back-end and supply-chain partners.

For example, staff on the shop floor may, while going the extra mile for their customer, need to make arrangements with procurement and warehouse managers to bring in a special order. Staff employed on the supply-chain process should also be customerfocused to help service their consumers fully,says Bana, and should therefore not be left out on training programmes.

“Organisations that are far-sighted will involve the entire delivery chain end-to-end to fail-safe the process,” he says. Perhaps, the most important element of creating a service culture is to change the way retailers view service.

“A lot of people have the ‘if-all-elsefails, try-service’ thinking. They really should try service at the start!” Getting the company to put customers first in every scope of work will be better directed if led from the front.

He demonstrates the point with a case study of F J Benjamin, who manages a host of brands including Gap, BabyGap, La Senza, Raoul, Guess and Banana Republic. According to Bana, F J Benjamin’s previous approach to customer service had been piecemeal and on an ad-hoc basis.

“After we started working with the company, we could really see a phenomenal service quality growth — managers are now sitting together weekly and discussing ideas that have service quality [as the starting point]. Customer service is the first on their agenda.”

The management at F J Benjamin also had all its employees, whether they were full-time staff or part-timers, attend customer-service training programmes during the busy months of November and December as part of the company’s preparations for the year-end seasonal sales.

“[The management] was prepared to face the fact that today it may have to trade off a little bit of sales, but for a longer-term benefit. To build a service culture, an organisation has to be led from the top, and will require a lot of commitment and time,” Bana maintains.

Leading from the front Senior associate director of KCS Executive Recruitment Services Christine Sim concurs with Bana’s view that good service in any retail organisation should be led from the front.

“A leader nurtures the environment to retain retail talent,” she says, adding that having a good leader is vital in building a strong retail organisation.

“Leadership is about frontline leadership — talking the walk and walking the talk,” she quips. “If a leader talks about an organisation having vision or initiative, the leader must be the first to portray it.”

The KCS group is one of Asia’s leading independent and integrated providers of corporate accounting and corporate secretarial services. Established in 1946 in Hong Kong, the group also provides executive recruitment search and selection services, and conducts training in customer service, customer relationship, merchandising solutions, retail-growth strategies and career development.

Sim considers a good leader to be one that is concerned with what she calls “servant leadership” — serving others before he serves himself, empowers his staff, and values mutual trust, respect and understanding. She also stresses that a good leader will also groom successors from within, as this helps to retain the level of competence in the role as well as build rapport with other members on the team.

Both Sim and Bana are of the same mind that a good leader is one that makes himself visible to his employees.

Apart from being able to create a closer-knit organisation, where the leader understands the needs and the day-to-day problems of his staff, a leader’s appearance can go a long way to ensuring better service provided or creating a better working environment.

“Store managers should be visible in the stores. They should always be alert to staff’s behaviour, body language and the way they speak to their customers,” says Bana, adding that not enough store managers are sensitised to pick up these nuances that ensure good customer experiences.

“Leaders who are present at stores are also able to make the workplace more pleasant by introducing changes that will benefit the staff,” Sim states.

“For example, they may notice that the cashier is pregnant and may provide herwith a chair while she works,” she says.

“This is what we call ‘participative management’ which will inspire staff to be rid of the ‘that’s-not-my-job mentality’.”

Leaders who are in touch with their employees’ work situations and introduce changes to make the working environment better will be appreciated, experts say, and can help an organisation retain important retail talent. Talent retention

“Because of Singapore’s high cost of living, employees tend to equate a job hop with a salary jump,” Sim says, adding that this is particularly true of younger employees. “The younger generation have witnessed their parents getting retrenched during the Asian crisis, and now question the subject of loyalty.”

While attempting to curb this occurrence with monetary benefits may ensure that important retail talent stays withthe organisation, it will erode a retailer’s margins.

Sim suggests that retailers rethink the perception of their young — and often creative — employees, and considerthem as consultants. This way, employees, although inexperienced, will feel like they have something to contribute to the organisation, and are thus valued.

“[Talent management is of] top importance as staff bring their feelings and emotions to work. They need to know that the company cares for their well-being, and areas of strategies implemented — to address such silent needs — are paramount to staff retention,” she asserts.

According to Sim, retail talent is an employee or a group of employees zealous about the retail industry, and who constantly increases the level of interaction with customers. These employees concern themselves with achieving customer satisfaction and have a passion for owning the results. These people make up approximately 20% of an entire retail organisation and can be found anywhere in the company — from top-level management to staff on the floor.

To retain these people, Sim believes it is important that retailers have their employees’ career opportunities charted — so that the talent in their organisation have a clear direction to work towards, and are more motivated.

“Employees should have the opportunity to explore different careers in the organisation,” Sim says. “For example, a cashier should be allowed to move on to become a retail assistant, buyer or even an in-house label manager.”

At the other end, retailers already recognised for their good service should not be complacent, cautions Bana. He cites an example of retail talents from casual-wear retailer Giordano in Singapore being poached to work for the recently introduced Gap stores.

“Retail talents are assets to the organisation,” he says, “and are highly valuable anywhere.”

All in all, experts agree that the good management of employees — in terms of career progression, employee welfare and engaging employees in the brainstorming process — is paramount to gaining and retaining good retail talent, who, with sufficient training, can enhance customer satisfaction and result in return visits and possibly higher sales.

“A retailer’s greatest strength is its people. A retailer’s greatest challenge is also its people,” Bana says.