Tips for Strategic Merchandizing
This may seem too simple to even mention, but I’m going to say it anyway:
This may seem too simple to even mention, but I’m going to say it anyway:
There may be industries out there where employee turnover isn’t a problem, but retailing certainly isn’t one of them. Finding, hiring and retaining good staff is one of the biggest challenges that retailers face, and many owners and managers get discouraged by how hard it is—regardless of the economy. One of the most frustrating situations […]
In the Servant Leadership workshops we teach, we often lead in to the content we’ve adapted from Robert Greenleaf by asking the group:
OK. How many of you are willing to admit that you’ve experienced this scenario: You needed someone to train a new hire, automatically chose the person who was the best performer in the job that needed to be trained—and then were disappointed with the results? Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’ve all done that at one time […]
Open Book Management was a brand-new concept to me just four months ago. I hopped on the ZingTrain in October 2018 as the next-generation ZingTrain Concierge, a position responsible for coordinating ZingTrain’s on-site seminars and workshops here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition to that, I report on, forecast and track ZingTrain’s public sales numbers […]
How do you welcome new hires into your organization? Do you hand them a uniform and point them in the general direction of the front counter? Do you have them attend several days of classroom training before they ever talk to a customer? Do they learn about your organization’s history and vision from someone in leadership? Or […]
Back in 2007, when Zingerman’s wrote Zingerman’s 2020 Vision describing what the business would look like in the year 2020, we wrote that “we [Zingerman’s] have successfully quantified fun, measured fun, and improved our fun factor by at least 380% since 2007. We actively teach people how to have fun at work. We have games […]
We all know service is important—right? We’d be surprised if there were a company left in the US which hasn’t incorporated some version of “the customer is always right” into its employee handbook. Every politician and business leader can quote statistics about the pros and cons of the relentless move towards a “service economy.” And […]
What does a truly great customer experience look like? We spend a lot of time thinking about this at Zingerman’s. In fact, we actively measure the customer experience by way of the Zingerman’s Experience Indicator (ZXI), which is our adaptation of the more commonly known Net Promoter Score. As Ari explains in this article, “the […]
When the holiday season rolls around, most of us have the ‘Busy Dial’ turned up to 10, or even 20 on some days.
For those of us who sell specialty products, customer education has always been part of the selling process. Sometimes we’re offering products that most customers have never heard of. Other times we have items with familiar names but vastly superior ingredients or construction. Almost always the prices that we charge are higher than what is […]
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