Fully engaged staff are best for happy sales moments

This time, we will go into this case in detail.

A number of leading consumer brands, selling big-ticket items such as cars and smaller luxury items such as apparel, have been paying increasing attention to the customer experience at the actual physical point of sale.

These companies spend considerable sums building a quality brand image only to find that the actual purchase experience falls far short of that image. The resulting perception not only leads to lost sales but eventually the loss of a customer for ever. This problem is also often accompanied by high staff turnover at the point of sale, resulting in significant cost in replacing and training staff.

What to do? Some companies throw a lot of money into training and employee and customer surveys, which help but do not solve the core problem. Fully engaged employees are the only way to solve the problem and fully engaged employees are those who fit the job and enjoy what they do every day. How do we find employees who will be fully engaged?

The answer lies in our natural behaviours and preferences - the ones we are born with. These are too hard to train and nearly impossible to change, so why not hire those behaviours and preferences in the first place?

A major luxury-goods company asked DBM to help them with this challenge throughout Asia-Pacific. A good starting point was with their existing employees, where the company was able to identify a sample group of proven performers in each country. Using a DBM profiling tool, a best-practice behavioural profile was established. The cultural differences between countries were identified for country-specific best-practice profiles. The results were compared to the DBM best-practices database to identify any company-specific issues. A best-practice behavioural and preferences profile was then developed and implemented for all customer-point sales employees across Asia-Pacific.

Thus, all offices of this company throughout Asia, including Thailand, were given a clear guide on the type of employee to hire - what was the optimal personality profile to build the best customer point of sale experience.

The results have been astonishing: employee turnover has fallen by half, employee engagement is up and the company is reporting that conversion rate on customer visits is up. The payback in implementing the process was less than six months on the employee turnover and training costs alone.

To build sales for any type of product requires a positive customer experience at the point of sale, which in turn requires highly motivated employees who fit the profile. Now a clear methodology exists to help you do that.

Eric Rosenkranz prepared this article with the help of Leigh Scott-Kemmis, chairman of DBM Thailand, who can be reached at leigh@dbm.co.th. Rosenkranz's company e.three (www.ethree-asia.com) helps satisfied employees create satisfied customers.