Yesterday I was downtown Palo Alto. I rarely go there because parking is impossible and they have not implemented a customer-centric solution like a free shuttle to a remote parking location. Anyway, I had a few requests from my daughter who is in bed recovering from an operation and decided to try the local CVS/Pharmacy. I enter a dark, poorly lit store and go to the customer service counter to get a pack of cigarettes. I don’t like the fact that she smokes but as the nurse said this is not the time to quit smoking: the additional stress would not help to recover from the operation. The Loomis guy is just coming in and the manager opens the safe behind the customer service counter: instead of being helped, I am being looked at suspiciously. The manager finally calls somebody and after a while a woman shows up, asks me curtly what I want, gets the cigarettes and holding the pack, she is ready to accept my payment. I tell her that I will get some more items and pay on the way out. “Oh we don’t do that! You have to ask for the cigarettes on your way out.” I get a cart and go collect the items on my list, get to the cash register, ask for my cigarettes, pay, put the bags back in the cart: “Don’t take the cart out of the store because it will lock!”. I looked at her floored. “We don’t let the carts out because when we did they used to disappear.”

In just a few minutes this store managed to make me feel uncomfortable, make me wait, make me understand that I am much less important than their process, and have crowned all that with the cart joke.

They could have inquired what I wanted when I showed up at the customer service counter. They would have lost a whole 10 seconds on the safe operation. They could have let me put the cigarettes in my cart or offer to leave them at the cashier for me to pick up on my way out. They could have explained that they did not let the carts out unaccompanied but have offered to take it to my car in the back parking lot. They could also have waited to see what I was going to do before jumping all over me because I had no intention to take the cart out since my car was far away. I was just planning to put it back with the other carts. But all those were customer-centric solutions, designed to keep and attract customers and it does not seem that this branch of CVS/Pharmacy wants customers.

This was one of the best example I have seen of why businesses are failing. More and more they forget that it is about the customer and that by failing to provide customer-centric solutions, they are losing their reason to exist.

For more information on implementing customer-centric solutions check out Business Life Success.

© Patrice Capitant and Patrice's Blog, 2011