The secret to good customer service and brand loyalty is, fundamentally, respecting the people who come into your store. Empathy, kindness, politeness, and professionalism are the way to go. But some store employees choose snobbishness and unnecessarily bad manners instead. And this reflects badly on the company.
Kim (@kim.can.do), who has recently given birth, went viral online with over 5.2 million views after sharing the negative experience she allegedly had after going to the premium athletic apparel store, Alo Yoga. She revealed how the employees there literally laughed at her and made her feel unwelcome. Scroll down for the full story, including a surprising update.
Customers want to feel respected and welcome when they walk into a shop, not ridiculed and belittled
Image credits: shurkin_son / Freepik (not the actual photo)
A postpartum woman went viral after sharing the negative experience she had after going into a fitness clothing store. The employees there were allegedly incredibly rude to her
Image credits: kim.can.do
Image credits: kim.can.do
Image credits: kim.can.do
Image credits: kim.can.do
Image credits: kim.can.do
You can watch Kim's video in full right over here
Image credits: Ron Lach / Pexels (not the actual photo)
Subtleties, including the quality of their first and final impressions dealing with a company, matter a lot to customers
There is no excuse for making a customer feel unwelcome, insecure, and belittled in your store. If you want to position your brand as elite, you can do so through the quality of your products and services, not by looking down on the people who come into your store.
When one company wrecks its reputation, others might swoop in to show that they’re different and care about their customers. When Kim’s video about the awful situation that Alo employees allegedly put her in went viral online, some clothing brands used the opportunity to show a different set of values.
For example, The North Face and Athleta both shared comments showing that they support Kim, and offered to send her some of their products out of kindness. The key here, from a business perspective, is to be authentic and genuine in your concern, not performative. What you proclaim online has to match your actual values as a brand.
Later, in an update video, Kim shared that Alo realized the mistake that its employees made. A company representative apologized and, as per Kim’s request, offered to make a donation to a charitable cause.
According to Forbes, even the most experienced experts can have blind spots when it comes to customer service and experience. For instance, you might focus too much on making positive first impressions (definitely not the case here) while utterly neglecting last impressions.
Because of the ‘primacy effect,’ first impressions carry more weight, definitely. If the very first encounters are negative, your customer might not stick around for long. And yet, that’s not the full picture.
“The final moments with a customer are of great importance as well. These, too, have been shown to leave a strong impression on customers. The hospitality industry understands this, which is why, when you leave a fine hotel at the end of your visit, much emphasis is placed on the quality of that exit experience; it’s also why most any restaurant, from the diner on the corner to Applebee’s to a Michelin-starred establishment, makes sure an employee posted near the door makes a point of wishing every exiting customer a good night,” Forbes explains.
“In most other industries, little attention is paid to the final moments of a customer’s experience; both human and physical ‘final impression’ gestures (such as invoices and receipts) are likely generic at best, and the end of a customer's time with a company is generally an afterthought, at best, in customer experience design and customer service training.”
Furthermore, brands need to realize that customer experiences depend a lot on subtle impressions, not just grand gestures. In other words, “the little stuff matters.”
Image credits: jtizzle555 / Reddit (not the actual photo)
Brands that don't manage their customer experiences well end up harming their reputation and losing both sales and customer loyalty
Meanwhile, the experts in curating a positive customer experience are meant to be frontline workers, your customer-facing employees. Broadly speaking, they, not executives, tend to have the most expert knowledge about how to engage with customers.
One thing that businesses might overlook is finding inspiration for innovations and best practices from all types of companies. If you focus exclusively on what your direct competitors are doing in your industry niche, you might miss out on some great strategies when it comes to treating customers well.
Additionally, it's essential to remember that your customers may not always know what they want, and they may struggle to articulate their needs and desires. Forbes notes that, with these limitations in mind, the data you get from customer feedback might not always be completely accurate when you’re thinking about changing your approach to customer service.
“Much better is to be humble about such limitations, avoiding putting too much weight on what customers seem to be saying they want, until the truth, slowly but slowly, can be ascertained.”
As pointed out by the Harvard Business School, customer experience management is vital. When it’s mismanaged, companies end up having little to no control over how their customers perceive their brand. The knock-on effect is that this leads to lower customer retention, fewer referrals, and lost sales. In a nutshell, it negatively impacts your profitability.
On the flip side, companies that actively manage their customer experience are “better positioned to understand customer variability—how consumers are different from one another—and meet their diverse needs, preferences, and expectations.”
Harvard Business School Professor Ryan Buell stresses: “If every customer behaved exactly the way we designed our system for them to behave and asked for things that perfectly aligned with what we were designed to deliver, it would be easy to deliver excellent service. But the reality is that customers aren’t all the same. They have different needs and preferences, and they don’t follow a script.”
How would you react if someone laughed at you when you walked into a clothing store? What is the rudest store employee or company representative that you’ve had the displeasure of ever interacting with? What do you think brands that offer awful customer service can do to genuinely make amends for their mistakes?
There was an outpouring of support. Here's how some people and companies reacted to what happened
