Penney gives managers more time with customers
There’s a lot of positivity surrounding J.C. Penney these days. The company has been turning in positive sales numbers when many of its department store peers have not. The retailer has launched a new ad campaign — “Get your Penney’s worth — with the goal of attracting new shoppers while continuing to speak with the chain’s core customers. Penney is also testing the sale of major appliances with an eye to growing its business while at the same time hurting a rival (Sears). Yes, everything looks good — except for the chain’s customer service scores.
According to a Dallas Morning News report, Penney’s Net Promoter Score was down by 10 points last year, trailing Macy’s, Kohl’s and Old Navy. The Net Promoter Score is seen as an indicator of future growth (or not) because it provides an answer to whether or not a customer would recommend a given retailer to a friend or colleague.
At an annual staff meeting held this week by the company (more than 1,000 managers attended), Penney executives emphasized the need for those running its stores to limit the duties that kept them away from customers.
Among the examples given in The Dallas Morning News report was the number of emails that store managers get from district offices and headquarters. Joe McFarland, executive vice president over J.C. Penney’s stores, called the level “unmanageable and overwhelming.”
Mr. McFarland also said store managers would have fewer reports to complete. The goal is to free managers up to spend more time making sure employees are trained properly. The initiative is also intended to give managers time to use their local market knowledge and creativity to find ways to distinguish their businesses from competitors.
- J.C. Penney to store managers: Focus on the customer, not your inbox – The Dallas Morning News
- The Net Promoter Score – Net Promoter Network
- Will Penney’s new campaign make cents to consumers? – RetailWire
- Will Penney’s appliance test put a fork in Sears? – RetailWire
Photo: JCPenney
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Is a lack of time with floor staff and customers a common problem in big box retailing? What changes should J.C. Penney expect in its stores be freeing up its managers from excessive email and reports?
Poll
BrainTrust
Mel Kleiman
President, Humetrics
Kevin Graff
President, Graff Retail
The most critical (and neglected!) position in retail today is the store manager!
As retail has become increasingly complex, layers on upon layers of SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) have been added. In many retailers, the position of store manager has literally become one of administrator, reporting and putting out fires.
In the past three decades of working with retail stores and pilots, the fastest way of turning around consumer experience and sales has been to work with store managers. It is also the investment that lasts over time. The key is that store managers are the lightning rod of the store’s culture, persona and experience. Changing the behavior and focus of store managers impacts associates who engage consumers across the store.
I applaud J.C.Penney’s focus on freeing up managers to focus on customers. They would be wise to have managers spend as much time with their internal customers .— the associates on the floor.
Yes, anything that takes a manager away from the floor and customers is bad. Give their store managers tablets to carry with them as they “manage by wandering around,” and the training to use these, would be one of the solutions which J.C. Penney could use.
Moving from time spent on paper work to time spent on people work. It’s hard to think of a strategy that would be more obvious.
In my experience we could quietly stop a great deal of the paper work and no one would ever notice. Much or most of it is make-work resulting from the make-work of those in the executive suite. It sounds like someone at J.C. Penney is defining which activities and behaviors actually lead to sales and profit. Helping customers buy stuff they really want sounds like a good start.
Managers working in retail stores are subjected to the same flood of email (often unnecessary) as employees in any other workplace. The difference is the need to “walk the floor” and do the customer-focused duties that involves, from training associates to checking merchandise presentation and replenishment. “Inspect what you expect” was and continues to be a good philosophy for retail management.
J.C. Penney could do itself a big favor, however, by developing more effective systems and store layouts to get customers through the checkout lines. Every J.C. Penney store that I shop regularly has an inefficient process (especially compared to Kohl’s) even on days when the stores don’t seem heavily trafficked. This needs to find a top-down solution, rather than depending on the presence of a manager on the sales floor to fix it.
First off, Maria Halkias, the writer of the Dallas Morning News article cited, is one of the best retail reporters out there. She’s insightful, writes very clearly and cleanly and from a PR person’s perspective is a pleasure to work with. Anyone interested in understanding the workings of the retail industry should consistently read her copy.
Yes, the managers and staff at big box stores spend too little time with customers. For that matter, merchandisers and marketers at big box stores and other retailers spend too little time with customers, preferring to believe they can automatically create demand for the products they source (only Steve Jobs could do that). It’s this disconnect that has me more worried than the in-store staff not engaging the customers. Merchandisers and marketers often seem to live in their own little world, interacting only with suppliers and other merchandisers and marketers. They’ve lost, or maybe never had, a feel for what the customer really wants. If you’re selling the wrong products and promoting it with the wrong message, you’re bound to fail regardless of the in-store engagement.
The key to better customer relations is better employee relations. The key to better employee relations is a better relationship between managers and employees. If J.C. Penney’s is truly interested in raising the net promoter score as it relates to customers they will work on raising the net promoter score as it relates to employees. How likely are you to recommend J.C. Penney as a place to work to your friends?
If you TRAIN your managers and then let them manage both scores will go up.
Here’s what I tell every store manager: the customers, staff and product are on the floor. That’s where you need to be. We make money on the floor, not the back room. If you’re in the back room pushing paper, you are an overpaid administrator. The talent we need from the manager is to be the merchant, the coach and the leader. Not the paper pusher. It is way easier to teach someone how to fill out reports than to run a profitable sales floor.
Get out of the back room and onto the floor!
Lack of store management time on the floor is a problem for all retailers not just big box. This is not unlike getting buyers and category managers out of headquarters and into the store. Store management must first make sure associate are doing their job properly. Second, they must identify where standard operating procedures need to be changed to flow with the customer. Third they should be talking with and observing customers.
Every one of the industry merchant princes spent time in the store with customers. Most disliked being in headquarters. Unless you like people you should not be in retail. J. C. Penney’s problem is typical for every retailer. Everyone in headquarters and regional office thinks they should tell store managers something to insure their own importance. Every email should be sent to a person to decide if it even needs sending or if the Reader’s Digest version can be just a effective.
Customer service is a big problem in big box retailing. Many retailers in other sectors have been moving to a real-time retail paradigm to solve this problem. There are technology solutions in the marketplace that can focus store and department managers on what is important to avoid the excessive emails and reports. These solutions free the managers and associates up to focus on the customer and coupled with customer-facing self-help mobile solutions can offer the J.C. Penney customer outstanding customer service. By leveraging the network retailers have the opportunity to create a virtual staffing pool across the country and leverage technology like FaceTime to take advantage of time zone differences to smooth peak times.
This is the power of real-time retail!
Not spending time on the floor is a problem for retail managers. Making decisions that relate to consumers is never effective if managers do not know and understand their consumers. While marketing data is helpful it is not a substitute for the knowledge gained by spending time with consumers.
It is easy to see how administrative tasks can build a wall between managers and customers — but it’s dangerous. And yes, it is probably more common than it should be among big box retailers.
Freeing managers up is just the first step. After all, with less work they could easily still hide in their offices. I think they need both a policy that ensures that managers get out of their offices and a process for making that customer interface time productive for the managers and visible to customers.
How and where retail staff spend their time is a problem across all formats but more aggravated in larger footprint formats. Freeing up managers from emails and reports is a big positive on several levels:
Good to remember that if you go down this path, you can’t go back to the old status quo since your customers will come to expect a higher level of service and interactions.
Lastly, if the technology and systems are not in place to support this work shift to more customer value-add work, then you’ll frustrate all concerned with poor execution (e.g., do you have full visibility into your inventory and inbound shipments? Can you access this information on a mobile device?).
It’s not managers who need time away from emails and reports to spend with customers on the floor, although it won’t hurt. The key is to empower employees on the floor to take care of the customer. That will mean hiring good people and training them. Do that right and the customer will have a better experience, regardless of how much time a manager spends on the floor.
I like the new “get your Penney’s worth” slogan a lot. The idea of getting the store management away from the gathering of useless information is good but the likelihood of it getting them on the floor is almost nil. A better move would be to reduce or remove the store manager position. The savings could be put towards populating the stores with sales and loss prevention associates. This move with incentives for overachievers would do much more for sales.
Putting the managers on the sales floor is going to make a huge difference. Why should the managers be stuck in a back office answering emails or making projections for a corporate analyst? Their time is best spent on the sales floor working with the sales associates and customers. It can’t be simpler than this.
A lack of any help at all on the sales floor is actually a big box signature and one of the reasons they’re getting Amazon-ed. If no one’s going to help me, why not just shop online (which apparently means Amazon)?
J.C. Penney’s efforts at private label along with “duh” ideas like letting your sales help actually help will go a long way for them. In the long run though, J.C. Penney will be a hard sell to digital natives who are now roaming the retail landscape in very unique ways, most of which are befuddling to digital immigrants like big box execs.
Removing blockades (e.g., emails, reports, etc.) has the potential to positively impact in-store customer support; however, the retail organization needs to instill the value of customer engagement in manager and associates, alike. This means managing the change process in-stores in order to truly drive the value of eliminating other responsibilities.
This: “The initiative is also intended to give managers time to use their local market knowledge and creativity to find ways to distinguish their businesses from competitors.” Give the store managers ownership of their business and the good ones will make a real difference.
Yes! It is always right for the store manager to spend more time on the floor with customers and employees, however, retail administrivia keeps them from doing so.
So J.C. Penney says they want the managers on the floor. Duh. What are they doing to cut back on all the back office work those managers are also required to do?
They can’t just talk the talk. They must also walk the walk.
For my 2 cents.
There is no bigger frustration for retail customers in stores to be looking for a sales associate or manager for help. Employees should be visible and accessible and J.C. Penney’s policy makes strides to accomplish that. Technology should be a tool to help you get your job done, not a tether to an office. J.C. Penney should explore mobile devices, including tablets, for store managers to hold while walking the floor. This would still provide access to any mission critical data, while allowing them to be present in front of customers.
Understaffed, poorly-trained sales associates are symptomatic of retail today. Permitting the store managers to spend more time with associates has potential to address the training issue. As an extra body on the sales floor, freeing up time for the manager could help a bit as well.
But great customer service is a combination of culture, training and empowerment as well as staffing levels. Removing tasks from the store manager is no guarantee that Penney’s will have solved the overall issue.
Retailers love to look at reports, especially sales and related KPIs. The challenge is that reports tell you what customers bought. They don’t tell you why they bought something nor do they tell you why they didn’t buy. Only time on the floor observing salesperson-customer interactions or direct sales time with customers give managers a true sense of what’s hot and what’s not.
Retail managers are also like a host at a party. They need to be on the floor but stay above the fray so they can look for those perishable sales moments, redirect their teams, and anticipate problems before they occur. JCP should do all they can to leverage their leaders so they can play a role that impacts many. A lot of retailers today miss the opportunity by burying their managers with information and directives. Let them be the conduit they can be by sharing their customer insights directly from the customer.
First off, I’m a merchandiser and not all merchandisers are in there own little world. I resent that comment Ron. I speak to everyone and go out of my way to help customers and associates. Yes I think J.C. Penney can do more. I stopped shopping there because of their customer service. When I go in there nobody offers any help.