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CUSTOMER SERVICE OFTEN LAGS RETAIL IN NEWER MARKETS

By Curt Hazlett

When Ben Mander’s new Apple computer failed to work properly, the retailer that sold it to the Singapore resident didn’t exactly welcome him back. It’s not our problem, he was told.

“Once you’ve bought something here, you cannot take it back to the shop — you have to take it to the distributor,” said Mander, a Briton who works for German chemical company BASF. “Which means that although you may have chosen the shop based on the convenience of where you live, you may have to go to the other side of the island to a distributor and join a queue of other unhappy customers.”

Modern retailing is spreading across the planet, but creating new buildings may prove to be far easier than establishing good sales skills. Surliness, odd policies and slow service appear to be common complaints, especially from expatriates like Mander who are used to more-customer-friendly policies.

Singapore is Mander’s second posting in Asia. He lived in Hong Kong for eight years, “and at that time customer service was practically nil. When you went into a shop, often you were told you couldn’t even look at something unless you agreed you were going to buy it. It was incredible.”

When he returned to Asia four years ago, a trip back to Hong Kong proved that retailers there had shed such attitudes and had caught up with global standards. “The first thing that struck me was that they had completely understood that they had to change that attitude,” Mander said. “The shops now are very helpful.”

Countless Internet blogs provide testimony to the condition of retail service around the globe, including this advice from a frequent visitor to Russia: “Before you go to Russia, you must first drop the notions you have in the U.S. of ‘excellent customer service.’ They don’t exist in Russia,” the blogger wrote. “Russian businesses usually go by the book on everything, even if it involves trivial things. Rarely will they go out of their way to do something extra for you. The staff would be scolded or reprimanded or fired if they didn’t do everything by the book.”

Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the global retail boom will be customer service consultants.

Doug Fleener, whose Dynamic Experiences Group consults with retailers on ways to improve the customer experience, notes that retailers need to keep a country’s culture in mind when opening stores. “One of the mistakes I’ve seen retailers make is that they want to bring the same exact level of service to the countries they enter, and sometimes that’s not the norm,” he said. For instance, sales techniques that would be normal in the United States seem aggressive in other cultures.

Still, retailers expanding in emerging markets need to work hard on providing a level of customer service that will differentiate them from others in the market.

“When you go international, in many countries the level of service is extremely poor, so it’s not that hard going above and beyond,” said Fleener, who worked for Bose Corp. when it entered the market in India. “The challenge is that the pool of applicants is also used to that same level of service. The biggest challenge for retailers is articulating the desired result in their training. When you can design it and teach it, you get a much more consistent level of execution.”