I recently filled out a customer satisfaction survey for my local grocery store. One of the questions asked was, "Were you greeted by every employee you encountered?" The available options were push 1 for yes and 2 for no. I pushed 2, but I wanted there to find a way to add, "But that's a good thing."
I have been to stores where every employee I encounter has greeted me. And it's completely overwhelming. It's one of many reasons why I do all possible shopping online. Part of this is based on a need for sales - if you interact with the customer, you have a better chance of talking them into more purchases. But part of it is also an attempt to make the store seem friendly, to make it all a positive experience for the shopper.
Totally doesn't work for introverts.
It works against introverts.
If I go into a store just to browse and find myself greeted by more than one worker or asked multiple times, "Can I help you find something?" I am much more likely to leave as soon as I can, without buying anything. On the flip side, if I am allowed to linger uninterrupted, to examine all the options without being shadowed by salespeople, I'm more likely to make a purchase.
Ideally, in a world that catered to both introverts and extroverts, you would be greeted as you walked in the door and asked if there was anything you needed help finding. It's nice to have that offer right off the bat. But then, after that, you're left alone. Employees could still wander the store to be available if somebody did need help finding something (or, better yet, be at some sort of centralized location where I could go and seek out someone for help if I needed it - help desks are fantastic - I'd be OK with either option), but they wouldn't interrupt the browsing process.
There are enough introverts out there that being greeted by every salesperson shouldn't be an automatically positive thing. And yet... somehow it is. It is distressing to me to hear questions like that one on customer satisfaction surveys and know that the employees of that store are being encouraged to disrupt and distract the introverts around them, all in the name of friendliness.
It's funny you mention this because just last night I actually had a random thought about this! I returned a Blu-ray to the Redbox kiosk at Walmart (Young Adult, not that it matters) and there was no greeter on my way in or out.
ReplyDeleteIt got me thinking about how advantageous that would have been for thieves, but then also I had the side thought that there were plenty of honest, non-thieving people who would also have appreciated the respite. I had only partially had the thought that introverts were among the group when I became distracted by being annoyed at the people in the parking lot, and the epiphany kinda died on the vine before I got very far with it.
So I think the moral of the story is that we can add, "No annoying people in the parking lot interrupting your epiphanies" to the list of pros to online shopping.
I love not having greeters, but I regard them as sort of a necessary evil. Some people *will* feel a little lost if they don't have someone greeting them when they walk into a store, and I'd be willing to yield a single greeting to make extroverts happy (at a specific point, when I can anticipate it) if they'll let me be left alone the rest of the time.
DeleteWhen I worked at a bookstore, the managers were always changing their minds about whether we should greet customers or not. One month it would be "Greet every single customer that comes in the store or you will get in trouble!" and the next month it would be "Leave people alone and just look attentive!" and the next month it'd be back to "WHY AREN'T YOU GREETING EVERYONE?"
ReplyDelete*facepalm*
THAT IS AWFUL. My vote is that nobody greet anybody in a bookstore. Bookstores are not generally social places and have kind of turned into introvert havens, and I'd like to keep them that way.
DeleteIn real life, we use non-verbal clues to know when it is appropriate to offer help to someone. We sometimes get it wrong, but we mostly it works. (Those clues are reasonably context-dependent, too -- we know that it is more important to offer help to people in some situations than in others.)
ReplyDeleteSalespeople would be fine using the same non-verbal clues, except we train them to override their awareness of the signals in order to be better salespeople.
Agreed, I think a fair amount of this is sales tactics rather than customer service. It just works against them for extreme introverts like myself, who just run away if they feel overpeopled. Heh.
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