Retailer Missed the Target

Dec. 27, 2010 - PRLog -- Major retailers, desperate to increase sales this holiday season, offered steep discounts but failed to deliver. Slick advertising brochures featured sale items for a limited period of time, but customers were unable to obtain the items, nor were some merchants willing to stand behind their promotions and honor them with 'rain checks.'

Case in point, Target failed to deliver one sale item this writer tried to obtain at several of their stores, and was informed that no rain check was being provided for it. Unfortunate because the item would have been a gift for a blogger who would have featured it regularly on her blog site, which would have given both the manufacturer of the item and Target, a tremendous amount of good publicity. Conversely, just the opposite.

Retailers are missing the point. Customers have grown weary of this kind of ‘Come On’ or ‘bait and switch’ technique. With the social media explosion, retailers need to realize that this is the dawn of a new era of customer service. Retailers need to forego gamesmanship to get customers in their stores, do a better job of forecasting demand, and stand behind their word to provide products at a discounted price when advertised as such. One disgruntled customer can blast his or her dissatisfaction over the Internet in a minute…while still in the store. This can dissuade avid social media participants from stepping across the threshold of the store as soon as it pops up on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. The viral effect of bad customer service grows exponentially as it reaches every ‘friend’ on Facebook whose friends then see it.

The term ‘viral’ has become the buzzword for the process of moving information through the social media networks much like the way a computer virus spreads. Negative feedback about a company’s lack of customer service, spread through the social media applications, is certainly a blight or virus on a company’s reputation. Retailers need to realize that if they're going to have a presence on Facebook, their Facebook page can bring about the store’s demise if customers use the store’s own ‘FB’ page to air complaints.

Retailers need to drill back further into the process to ensure that their suppliers will be able to supply the demand and be willing to respond quickly to upsides. The merchants also need to budget the increased cost of airfreight for upsides and the cost of shuffling merchandise to different stores to meet local demands. If they can’t provide the item in a timely fashion, they should stand behind their sale promise by offering rain checks. And most importantly, empower their employees to do whatever it takes to appease the customer before the iPhone or Blackberry can be whipped out and logged onto. If they’re unwilling to do so, it would be best not to feature an item at a discounted price. False advertising can be exploited by customers with just a few keystrokes and then linked to numerous social media sites in minutes. As of this writing, there are over 300 sites that a disgruntled customer can post their complaint. This site is just one of them.




J. Werner of Collage has both an M.S. and an M.B.A. with an emphasis in strategic planning.

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Freelance reporter, writer, featured columnist, blogger, and public speaker, focusing primarily on aiding non-profit organizations in fulfilling their mission statements.