“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45 NIV).
“Who’s our customer?” asked the consultant from the McKinsey Group to a gathering of top management of the Jack Eckerd Corporation.
The year was 1987 and as one of the district managers in attendance, I thought, “So, how much did we pay this guy?”
But after listening to his presentation, I realized that we needed to make some major changes in our drug stores. I guess it took an outsider to come in and get our noses off the chalkboard. Our company was in trouble because we really didn’t know the answer to the simple question, “Who’s our customer?”
We’d started the 80s at the top of our game, but some huge changes in retail took place during that decade. Customers used to be loyal. They shopped the same drug store every week. But when the “big box” centers (Walmart, Kmart, Target…) showed up in town and started selling prescription drugs too, our once loyal customers became bargain shoppers. They only shopped for deals. And the big box stores were undercutting our margins.
So, we chased “our” customer by cutting prices and running more aggressive advertising. The problem was that we couldn’t compete with the big box’s margins. High volume had never been our forte. We were “America’s Family Drugstore.”
The other huge strategic error we’d made (in addition to chasing the bargain hunters) was that our stores weren’t set up to make for easy shopping. They were set up to make it hard for shoplifters to steal (think one-way activated gates at the entrance and aisles that funneled customers past the checkout at the exit). And they were set up to make customers walk through the store, all the way to the back, to the pharmacy to get their prescriptions (So they would have to pass by all of our other fine sales items twice before leaving). In other words, we’d designed our stores to maximize benefit to us, not our customer.
The McKinsey people helped us see our true customer and how we could meet their needs. We decided that our niche customer (in contrast to the big box bargain shopper) was female, hi-touch (wanted help from a sales person when needed), valued convenience (wanted to get in and out quickly), and wanted value (was willing to pay a little more if you were clean, instock, and offered excellent service).
So, unlike some large corporations (and some institutions) we changed. We redesigned our stores, putting the cosmetics departments near the front door (female). We retrained our staff (hi-touch) for better service. We reset our stores and removed the gates and traffic funnels. We even relocated from malls and strips to free-standing stores on street corners and added drive-throughs (convenience). We cleared our aisles of stacked cases of sale items and focused on always being in-stock on the basics (value).
The result was that the company rebounded and grew again, becoming the number two drugstore in the nation for a time. Of course, some 17 years after I’d left the drugstore business, Eckerds was bought out by another retailer. Every successful business has to keep asking the question, “Who’s our customer?” My guess is that it only takes a decade or so to lose track of the answer to that question again.
Who’s our customer in the church? Is it the church members? Is it the attenders or visitors? Or is it… God?
Here’s a related question… do you think that a church “service” is the place where you come to serve or be served?