Leadership (A Special Report) --- Good Service Gone Bad: What makes one consumer happy may annoy

another; It's easy for companies to cross that fine line

By Amy Merrick
1,405 words
30 October 2006
The Wall Street Journal
J
R4
English
(Copyright (c) 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
THAT GROCERY-STORE cashier who always smiles as she hands you your receipt -- is she flirting with you, or
is it just part of her job? Do the salespeople at the mall clothing store all need to crowd the entrance to greet you,
leaving other shoppers to search the racks alone? Is it wise for a store to point you to a self-checkout lane without
making sure you have all the materials you need for a home-improvement project?

Ask any retail or restaurant executive about the keys to success, and you'll hear something about providing
excellent customer service. But there's a fine line between catering to customers and annoying them, and that
line is made even thinner by the fact that what delights one shopper may repel another. So it's easy for a store to
slip into practices that seem forced, uncomfortable or downright strange -- and that leave no one available to
provide real help for customers or answer their questions. Good service gone bad: It's enough to drive a
customer batty.

At cosmetics counters, for example, the hovering-salesperson approach often backfires. "The sales personnel
come up to you every five seconds," says Esme Vos, founder of the Web site MuniWireless.com, which tracks
city-sponsored broadband projects.

"It's hard to browse, let alone think about what you want, because they keep interrupting your train of thought,"
says the 45-year-old Ms. Vos, who lives in Amsterdam and San Francisco. "I guess the salespeople are bored
standing at the counters all day, but the same thing happens in Sephora, which is set up to allow customers to try
the products. I feel pressured and often just walk away." (A spokeswoman for Sephora, a unit of LVMH Moet
Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, says its stores are designed for customers to browse freely, and its employees are
trained to "help, not hassle," shoppers.)

Offering help in the first minute at a makeup counter actually can drive away shoppers, says Paco Underhill, chief
executive of Envirosell Inc., a retail-focused research and consulting firm based in New York. Instead, he says,
sales improve when clerks let customers try the display products on their own, then step in with assistance only
when a shopper starts looking confused.

One major retail chain, he says, used to have a rule called the "10-second greeting," in which each shopper had
to be acknowledged within 10 seconds of entering the store. Employees would mill around the entrance, all vying
to be the first to deliver the 10-second greeting.

"I think there's often a disconnect between somebody who sits at a desk, trying to construct a customer-service
model, and somebody who takes it out on the floor and tries it before starting to proselytize," Mr. Underhill says.

Like the makeup mavens, waiters can easily step over the line between attentive and intrusive. "When one person
has finished a meal, it is awful for the waiter to whisk away the plate, saying, 'I'll take this away from you,' when
the other person is still eating," says Ellin Johnson, a 69-year-old high-school teacher in Portland, Ore. No plate
should be cleared until after everyone at the table has finished, she says, "and then only after a courteous minute
or two. I have been in expensive restaurants with this premature plate removal."

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Service also can go awry when a company tries to make customers feel like they have a personal relationship
with the business and its employees, but the customer doesn't want to make friends.

Marti Barletta, president of TrendSight Group, a consulting firm based in Chicago, visited a number of banks while
working on a recent project for a client. Posing as a customer who was moving to Charlotte, N.C., she found the
personal bankers eager to chitchat about the city -- even the flowers -- but they were very slow to get down to
business, she says.

"There's been a fair amount of writing that women are all about relationships," Ms. Barletta says. Businesses are
"probably teaching customer-service people to be all about relationships and forgetting that I'm pressed for time,
and women in general are pressed for time."

At Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream shops, young employees scooping ice cream into dishes labeled "like it," "love
it" and "gotta have it" (instead of small, medium and large) are expected to sing in unison whenever a patron
drops a tip into a cup near the register. The musical thank-you, which varies from store to store, is supposed to
add to the lighthearted atmosphere that the franchiser tries to cultivate.

But it just gave the creeps to Jason Feifer, a 26-year-old free-lance writer in Cambridge, Mass. "It's unsettling," he
says. "It's like the company wants to trick me into thinking that this pimply kid is overjoyed to make my ice cream.
And I know that's not true."

On a return trip to Cold Stone, he says, he told the cashier that he was going to tip her, but she didn't have to
sing. She thanked him, and he turned away, relieved for a moment. Then the singing started up again. "I'm sure
the company thinks it encourages tipping, but I would dispute that," Mr. Feifer says.

Kevin Donnellan, a spokesman for Cold Stone Creamery, says the "entertainment factor" is a cornerstone of the
company's business.

Several years ago, grocery chain Safeway Inc. came under fire for requiring its employees to smile and make eye
contact with customers. In 1998, some female employees filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, alleging that the strictly enforced orders led to harassment from male shoppers, who
thought the cashiers were flirting with them. (The issue later was settled in an agreement between union officials
and management. A Safeway spokesman says the company published a printed guide and a video in 2000
clarifying its policies.)

A study last year by consulting firm Accenture Ltd. reported that forcing employees who don't feel cheerful to
smile takes a psychological toll that can lead to "emotional exhaustion and burnout." The study suggested that
managers encourage unhappy employees to visualize cheerful events or do stretching exercises, with the goal of
genuinely improving their mood.

Even when customer service goes wrong, the original intention was probably good. Aside from the
misanthropes, customers like to be acknowledged and treated respectfully, to feel as though their presence is
welcomed. It's reasonable, too, to hold employees in service industries accountable for how they deal with
customers. Yet when interactions become scripted and codified, the opportunity to make a true connection -- the
goal of all these activities -- is lost.

The roots of the problem go back decades, says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for NPD Group Inc., a
research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. In the 1980s, struggling retail chains desperately tried to reduce
overhead by cutting staff. The stores exchanged genuine customer service for handfuls of coupons and a greeter
at the door, he says.

"Retailers are busy doing a shotgun approach, when they need to talk to you individually as a customer," Mr.
Cohen says.

A big mistake companies made in their push for efficiency, he adds, was relying too much on self-service
checkouts. While researching his book "Why Customers Do What They Do," Mr. Cohen watched a woman buy a
kitchen faucet at a Home Depot Inc. store, checking out at a self-service station.

Trailing the shopper to the parking lot, he asked if she had the wrench she needed to undo the old faucet or the
putty to reapply the sink mount. Not only had she not bought those items, she didn't even know she needed them.

Home Depot says its employees, including cashiers, are trained to ensure customers have everything they need
for a project, but the company didn't know if this shopper had talked to any of its staff before buying the faucet.

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---

Ms. Merrick is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Chicago bureau. She can be reached at
amy.merrick@wsj.com.

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