A First-Impression Lesson From Circuit City

Orginally published on Monday, November 06, 2006 at 7:58 AM
by Alan Nelson

I just ran into a friend who, without prompting, described in detail a negative experience she and her son had while shopping for a digital camera at Circuit City. Their salesperson had showed them a selection of cameras but she’d criticized the Kodak camera. “It’s junk,” the salesperson said. “Be careful,” my friend told her. “I own a Kodak digital camera, and I like mine.”

“Oh, no, they’re junk,” the girl responded. She went on to recommend the Canon but spent very little time describing its quality or options. Instead she concentrated on trying to sell the two-year extended warranty. “You really need the warranty. These things are very temperamental.”

“I don’t want to know about the warranty,” my friend told her. “I want to know about the camera.” The cost of the camera was $179, plus another $80 for the two-year warranty.

In addition to problems with this salesperson, my friend said the store was “a mess.” In essence she was telling me, “Circuit City stinks.”

My friend and her son left Circuit City and went to Sears. While Sears has been knocked in recent years for its lack of progressiveness, she found the salesperson there to be very cordial and helpful. “We’ll match the price of a competitor,” he told her.

“But I don’t have any verification,” she said.

“Oh, that’s okay, I trust you,” he explained. “Plus we’ll take an additional $2 off. The two-year warranty here is only $25.” He leaned forward, smiled, and whispered “If you drop the camera in water or run over it with your car, just tell them you don’t know what happened to it, and they’ll replace it.”

My friend and her son purchased the camera on the spot. “I’m never going back to Circuit City,” she said.

Most of us have read the statistics of how one disgruntled customer will tell seven other people, while a contented one will only share the news with one. In this case, one dissatisfied customer told a friend who is now using Circuit City as a good example of a bad example for potentially 80,000 readers of this e-newsletter, who in turn may forward it to who-knows-how-many others.

Circuit City probably has strengths, or they wouldn’t still be in business, but anecdotal incidents like this one do a lot of damage to public relations. While companies spend millions in marketing dollars, they obviously underestimate the importance of training front-end clerks.

The lesson for churches is three-fold:

1) What are visitors saying about you as they drive by your property, walk through the front doors, and experience their first service? Every church in America thinks of itself as friendly, but you’re only as friendly as your first-time visitors believe you to be. Do you have any way of gathering such feedback?

2) How much training do you invest in your front-end people? Undoubtedly you’ve spent a lot of money on your facilities, staff, and programs, but first impressions are lasting ones. Do you aim for a few warm bodies thrown onto a hospitality team, or do you recruit, train, and do follow-through with the folks who represent your church and more important—God—to “shoppers”?

3) Have you ever hired a secret shopper to experience your church? While seeking honest feedback from visitors is a good start, don’t count on visitors to be open. As guests, they’ll likely only tell you things that are neutral or positive, not wanting to be impolite or rude. Hire an anonymous shopper. You can find a checklist from the book, The Five Star Church (by Stan Toler and Alan Nelson, Regal Books) located on the http://www.rev.org Web site under “Rev! Magazine Extras.” For another good resource, check out First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences in Your Church (by Mark L. Waltz, Group).

Your church and Jesus are far too important to take front-end service lightly.

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Alan Nelson is the executive editor of Rev! Magazine (www.rev.org), the author of a dozen books, and has been a pastor for 20 years. You can reach him at . You can subscribe to the Rev! Weekly Leadership Update here.

 

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