January 19, 6:40 am
Circuit City failed because . . . .
By Dan Bobinski
Director, The Center for Workplace Excellence
Frankly, they blew it.
Yes, it’s natural to first point to the bad economy, but after hearing they were going under, I recalled my personal experiences with the company and suspected the reasons were deeper than just the bad economy. So, this past weekend, when I came across a few blog posts and articles about why they’re going under, my hunches appeared to be confirmed.
For example, here’s a direct quote from Brooke Crothers’ nanotech blog, describing the scene inside a Circuit City near his house this weekend (Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET and editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street Journal):
“One male employee, in the section I was browsing, spent most of the time I was there (about 15 minutes) pleading ignorance and searching for a manager who never (apparently) materialized.”
Crothers also says:
“I have been to Best Buy dozens of times in the past two years. I’ve been to Circuit City–even though it’s closer–maybe six times, and always as a last resort.”
Crothers’ experiences with Circuit City appear to match mine. Whenever I was there, the customer service has been somewhere between “bad” and “horrid” about 95 percent of the time.
Circuit City employees new NOTHING about the products on their floor. Conversely, at the Best Buy near my house (which is farther away than Circuit City), the employees are quite knowledgeable. And, if they didn’t have an answer, they didn’t try to buffalo me (which happened a lot a Circuit City), they went and found someone to answer my question.
The result? Crothers voted with his feet (and his pocketbook). I did, too. And obviously, so did many, many more.
The Lesson:
The lesson is pretty clear: You’re more likely to retain customers if you keep your employees well-trained —- they must speak with confidence about the products and services they sell and deliver good customer service. Consumers will reward that by making purchases.
If your company doesn’t provide a good level of customer service, your customers’ feet will leave … and so will their pocketbooks.
Filed in Business, Opinion, Training, Sales, Selling, Customer Service, Workplace
I went to Circuit City just once to buy a USB thumb drive that was advertised in the Sunday newspaper. Then I went back to shopping at Best Buy for the same reasons you and Brooke Crothers described.
Best Buy is better at customer service than Circuit City was. They are not perfect. When I was shopping for CDs before Christmas I saw they had Rodney Crowell’s latest, Sex & Gasoline, hilariously misfiled under Comedy rather than Country. Rodney is noted for having both written “I Walk the Line - Revisited” and gotten Johnny Cash to sing the quote from his original song.