Customer Experiences are better when employees use Common Sense
I woke up Monday morning and realized I had left home the night before without my “funeral pants.” No I really don’t have funeral pants as someone did ask me; but those pants were the ones I had worn to the 3 previous funerals in the past month. So here I am at 7:00 in the morning walking around my mom’s house saying “Crap, crap, crap; I can’t go to a funeral in the torn jeans I wore last night.”
Who’s open this early I thought. Kmart? Target? Walmart?
Quick smartphone search and I find Target is open at 8:00AM; the location is right near the funeral – which starts at 8:30.
7:45 AM I am off to Target.
I find new funeral pants; they fit. I yank off all the tags (especially the long sticker that goes down the leg with your waist and inseam size; which I have in the past walked around displaying); walk out of the fitting room; hand the woman back the card that shows how many garments I walked in with and told her I’m wearing the pants.
And then it went like this…….
“You can’t wear them. You have to pay for them and then come back and put them on.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Security is going to stop you” I was told by one of the four associates standing by the fitting room. The other three looked on with those “yeah, that’s the rule” looks.
“Well that makes no sense; either way I’m going to walk out of the store wearing the pants; with a paid receipt? You can walk me to the register if you’d like.”
“Well you can’t do it that way.” Clearly this was going nowhere. First, I was thinking what happened to the customer was always right? Second, you still haven’t given me a valid reason why this rule or policy is in place?
“I’ll take my chances of being tackled by security” I said and walked towards the register. I know; in the time I was having this exchange I could have just followed their rules; but this was just silly and made no sense to me. I like Target; and I couldn’t imagine Target training people to make a customer experience a hassle?
I approached the register, gave young man the tag, told him I am wearing the pants; he gave me a bag for my jeans and as I walked out the Security Officer held the door for me and told me to have a great day.
Am I missing something here? Is Target missing an opportunity to train its people a bit better? Or is this one of those situations that require common sense only and maybe we need to actually come up with a college course in such?
Teach your employees to use common sense and the employee experience and the customer experience will rock!
