Retailers’ Obsession With Collecting Your Personal Information Is Ruining Customer Service
I had found what I wanted all by myself. Nobody was out on the floor to help me, although four salespeople were standing by the registers laughing and chatting among themselves. As I took my items up to pay for them, one of the salespeople moved toward the register, put her hands on the keyboard and, without looking at me, said “Name, please.”
Me: “That’s a strange way to start the transaction. Why do you need that?”
She: “You’ll need it to get our emails or if you want to return any of your items.”
Me: “I really don’t think you need my personal info for a refund as long as I have the receipt, right?”
She: “We’re supposed to get the information.”
Me: “I think we can do without it today. Let’s just go ahead and complete the purchase, ok?
She reluctantly agreed and processed my credit card. No questions whether I found everything I need. Zero engagement.
Not long ago, sales people actually looked forward to meeting and talking with customers about the product. Even when they weren’t on commission, they considered it the most important part of the job: Making sure customers got what they wanted and had a pleasant shopping experience.
In recent times, creating lists and then managing, renting and selling those lists has become a big business all its own. And it was easy to see that customers coming into a store to make a purchase presented an easy opportunity to acquire a valuable commodity: a name and email address for a list. So I guess it had to happen that retailers put incentives in place to encourage sales people to collect customer data at the point of sale.
I guess it was a short jump for a shift in attitude to take place in retail establishments: Sales people have started to regard this data collection as Job 1 of their duties. They’re beginning to view the customer standing in front of them not so much as the person they are supposed to please, but as a resource — the target of their data collection work. A bad — and potentially fatal — change in focus.
Brick-and-mortar stores already face a threat from online retailers that is serious enough to crater their entire business model. In a previous article, I said their ONLY defense is to create a customer experience people value enough to leave home and go shopping.
When they squander this opportunity by turning customers standing right in front of them into mere data sources, they are doing more damage to themselves than any other single factor in today’s marketplace.
The battle for the survival of brick-and-mortar is raging. I hope they wake up to their own self-destructive behavior before it’s too late.