A Trip to Wonderland

I went to renew my drivers’ license this past Saturday and felt like I had just steeped through the looking glass.

When I do my training classes on customer service, I ask attendees “What state government agency is universally hated in every state?” The answer I get most often is Department of Motor Vehicles. So Saturday after four years of avoiding going to the DMV I had no choice. It was close to the end of the month and it was a Saturday. The worst possible time to renew, but I had no choice; my license was going to expire on Sunday. Reluctantly I went and I was prepared for the worst.

As I pulled up to the main DMV office – the only one open on the weekend, I saw empty parking spaces. My first thought was that the DMV was now closing early in response to budget cuts. I even started to drive past the DMV when I noticed a couple of people walk in the door. I was shocked. Things looked strange and were getting stranger. It was almost as if I had seen a fully dressed white rabbit walking through the doors of the DMV.

I made a questionably legal U-Turn right into the parking lot to chase the rabbit and hoping no one saw that maneuver moved quickly inside the building to get lost in the crowd. As I dropped down the rabbit hole, I thought “Uh oh! Not a big enough crowd to get lost in.”

A Highway patrolman walked in the door. Was he looking for me? Like the Mad Hatter, I put my hat on, and pulled the brim down low in an effort to blend in as I joined the line to be screened.

In the DMV here, you have to be screened to move to the next level of bureaucracy. The process reminds me of the “tea party” where nothing makes sense. You have to stand in line to get permission to stand in line.

I quickly moved up in line until I was before one of the “screeners.” These are people who make sure you have all the right documentation BEFORE you get in the REAL line. In the past this line would have taken me 35 to 45 minutes on a good day. A good day would have meant being in the parking lot ten minutes before the door opens on a Wednesday in the second week of the month. On a Saturday towards the end of the month this line alone would have been a good hour plus wait.

But this line moved. It moved so fast, I couldn’t read my book because the people behind me kept telling me “the line moved.” I moved through the screen line in 13 minutes.

The attitude of the screener was different. In the past they would just hold out their hand to receive your paperwork, look at it and give you a number. You hoped they didn’t send you back home chasing some obscure piece of paper.

After receiving a service number, you would have to go and sit and wait for your number to be called. This time smiling like the Cheshire cat she greeted me, and after looking at my paperwork, called me by name and told me the renewal line was moving pretty fast and they would have me out pretty soon. Of course, though shocked she even talked to me, I didn’t believe her.

Once I got my number, I looked at the Call Board and saw there were 42 people ahead of me. Now this was more like the DMV I remembered. I sat down and started reading. I had been reading only about ten minutes when I looked up as saw there were only three people ahead of me. My first impulse was to look and see if my watch had stopped – no DMV line moves this fast. In the time it took me to check my watch and look up at the board again – MY number was up.

I looked at my watch. “Curiouser and curiouser!” I thought to myself. This can’t be real I must be dreaming because I had spent only 11 minutes waiting.

I went to the window, reviewed all my information, and paid and was told to go to the photo window. Four minutes after my number was up, I was on my way to the photo window. What happened next shocked me even more.

The clerk took my picture and then told me she thought it didn’t look good and asked my opinion of it. My head was spinning. Did I hear her right? It didn’t look good and she wanted my opinion? I thought they were trained to take bad pictures. I looked and agreed it was lousy.

Then just when you think things can’t get more shocking they do…she retook my picture FOUR TIMES until she got one we both agreed was good. Five minutes later I was walking out with a new drivers license.

I came in expecting a two to three hour exercise and walked out in a little over thirty minutes. Something had changed. What happened? The place was quiet. No one was stressed. People seemed happy. There were only two possibilities here. The first was this was the site of the first Stepford DMV operation. The second possibility was massive use of recreational drugs.

The is a third possibility that was so far fetched I didn’t even consider it until them: something has changed in the way the government does business.

It is a crazy world. Black is white. Bad is good. Corporations are now reviled for poor customer service and the DMV is the paragon of perfect customer service.

Bah Humbug!

I guess that I will be forced to address Christmas several times over the next couple of months. Today I am compelled to address it because I saw Scrooge yesterday. Yes Scrooge exists. I, like most of you, thought he was a fictional construct used as a thinly disguised metaphor representing the “de-humanizing” aspect of industrialization at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

After yesterday, I came to realize that he was real.

An explanation is in order here. I walked into a furniture store and had the pleasure (?) of witnessing the motivational session of a sales manager chastising a salesperson for arriving at the store twenty minutes late. This was a bad experience for the salesperson to be sure; but it was also a bad experience for the store on many levels.

The first level of bad was the fact there were witnesses. Unfortunately the sound acoustics in the store are very good, and the sales manager was passionate about what he had to say. So I and about seven other people got to listen to Scrooge tell the salesperson, a young woman in her mid-twenties, “Your baby sitter problem is yours. You being late is mine! I don’t give a f**k about your problem. But if you’re late again; even one second, you’re outta here!”

When something like this happens on a sales floor it poisons the buying mood of customers. Customers want shopping to be a fun and pleasant experience. What happened on the sales floor was the equivalent of a drive by shooting. All buying activity came to a halt. The seven customers in the store began browsing their way towards the door to leave. The “nervous energy” of those remaining contaminated the “buying attitudes” of the customers who came into the store after the motivational “drive by.”

I have seen this happen many times in many different stores and the results are always the same, buying slows dramatically until there has been a complete change over of customers on the floor.

The second level of bad was the effect on the salespeople. The morale of the rest of the salespeople plummeted. Being is sales is a hard job. It takes a lot for salespeople to get into that “happy place” mentally to be able to do their jobs effectively, and the sales manager just destroyed it.

The effects are salespeople are similar to an experiment I read about in a psychology class in college many years ago. It was a scientific experiment investigating the effects of motivation/de-motivation using plants.

In the experiment, there were three rooms: In the first room were two plants, the control group. These were just left alone. They were watered and fertilized automatically with no human contact. They just grew. In the second room, the two plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was talked to in a nice an encouraging way. They both thrived, but the plant talked to grew a little grew taller and a little bushier than it’s roommate. In the third room, the plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was verbally abused. Both were equally barren and stunted.

After spending years in sales management and more years watching sales management, I can say without fear of contradiction that the effects of most sales manager “motivational” conversations have the same effects on salespeople and they did on plants.

The third level of bad is the negative impact on the bottom line. For customers, the memory of their experience that day will last for years. This event caused a very visceral reaction that is now going to be incorporated into the subconscious memory of all the shoppers who witnessed it. They now have a negative feeling associated with this store anchored at the subconcious level. In the future, when given a choice to shop at this store again or another store, subconsciously they will go to the other store first.

The store will lose those customers for life. Unless this store creates a reason so compelling for them to come back it negates their subconscious feelings. That reason is usually a “very big discount” sale. And that is what is happening more and more. In this store, on this weekend, they are having 70% off sale.

After what happened yesterday I make the following prediction: The sale will be extended!

When I see retailers posting lower than expected earnings and blaming the housing market, I see a bunch of people in denial. Customers haven’t stopped buying; they just stopped buying from them. So as we enter the season of good cheer, I offer this word of advice to the Scrooges of sales management: Be nice to your salespeople!

My first sales manager mentor was a man all the salespeople would fight tigers for. He taught me well and as I moved up the food chain, I had the kind of sales management success he had by following his five simple rules.

1. Love your salespeople. Make them feel they are the most important people in the company because they are. They are the people who generate the revenue that feeds everyone else.

2. Commend in public. Reprimand in private. Seeing you come out onto the sales floor should be a good thing; not the feelings of dread felt by a cell of prisoners watching the executioner coming for his next victim.

3. Be a trainer, not a dictator. Salespeople are like thoroughbred racehorses; the are nervous, skittish, high strung and temperamental. They rarely respond well to the whip. Do everything in your power to help your people improve their talent, skills, abilities, and life; and they will win races for you.

4. Don’t post sales performance records for all to see. Everyone must believe they are winners, posting performance divides the team into winners and losers.

5. Do everything in your power to make the sales floor a fun and exciting place to work. Happy salespeople cause customers want to shop and return often to a place that is fun and exciting.

The holidays are here (already) and the difference between a good season and a bad season is going to be the happiness levels of your salespeople.

"...Christmas is already here!"

Christmas is coming earlier and earlier every year. Here we are barely in October; not yet past Halloween, the elections or even Thanksgiving and I have already seen my first Christmas Display.

It was an aisle of Christmas decorations and lights. There were also shelves of “pre-wrapped” stocking stuffers with a visual display of the contents. There were boxes of cards and a rack of wrapping paper rolls and ribbons.

We haven’t even advanced into fall yet. It was 85 degrees outside, the sun was shining and I was in a tee shirt, shorts and flip-flops staring at an Inflatable Santa next to a Snowman inside an inflatable Snow Globe complete with blowing snow.

Probably the tackiest of all (at least to me) was the selection of “Pre-Paid Christmas themed gift cards” that take all thought and consideration out of the gift shopping process.

I think retailers have killed Christmas. It has lost it’s magic for me and many people I know. For a lot of people Christmas is now so commercial it has become a chore. The death of Christmas is even becoming a popular theme in Hollywood as shown in the movie "Christmas with the Cranks."

Christmas has become more about buying and less about giving if I were to believe the signs throughout the store encouraging me to shop early and avoid the rush. It reminds me of an old Stan Freeberg comedy routine called: “Green Chri$tma$.”

(http://freberg.8m.com/text/greenchristmas.html).

There was a time when the approaching colder weather was a sign the holidays were coming, but now the retailers are skipping right to the mother lode of shopping and moving the season up sooner and sooner as the chase the Holy Grail of more sales.

There was a time when Thanksgiving weekend was the “semi official” start of the Christmas shopping season. What ever happened to Thanksgiving and Halloween? I guess they aren’t profitable enough to be focused on by retailers.

On a technical note: I think that moving the shopping season up earlier and earlier each year is the reason why Christmas sales are so disappointing and getting more so each year for retailers.

Christmas shopping has gotten to be such an “Un-Special” experience, it doesn’t matter when you Christmas shop anymore. Over the last few years I have heard more and more people talking about doing the Christmas shopping for the following year during the January clearance sales.

It’s ironic in a way, by moving the shopping season up earlier, consumers have taken it to an extreme and are using the retailer’s Christmas overstock situation as a bargain shopping opportunity... for next Christmas.

There is going to be a death spiral aspect to the Christmas shopping season next year only a retail consultant or bargain shopper can love. To make up for the lack of sales this year, retailers are going to make the Christmas shopping season even more "unspecial" next year by moving the season to August.

The longer and earlier shopping season will cause even more merchandise to be sold at deeper discounts the following January as holiday sales again fail to meet expectations. This will end up causing retailers to attempt a recovery the following year by kicking off the Christmas shopping season on 4th of July weekend.

This does not say good things about the country, the economy or even us as a people. I fully expect to wake up on Christmas Day and see ads in the newspapers and on television claiming there are only “365 more shopping days until Christmas!”