Staff Your Store for Customer Need Knowledge

Researchers at Germany’s University of Mannheim and University of Bochum explored the relationships of:

• Customer need knowledge (CNK), which the researchers defined as the extent to which a frontline employee in a store—the one who serves customers face-to-face—accurately and promptly identifies each customer’s needs and desires
• Customer satisfaction with their experience with the frontline employee
• Customer judgments of value in what they purchased from the frontline employee

     Based on their statistical analyses of information gathered from customers, employees, and store managers, the researchers found that when the CNK of employees in a store is higher, customers tend to be more satisfied and to say they’ve gotten better value from their purchases. An employee with high CNK pays close attention to each customer they’re with and is concerned with the problems of that customer.
     All this is not particularly surprising. Still, it’s nice to have experimental validation of what we suspected to be true. The research findings do go beyond this to suggest two ways to increase the CNK of your store’s employees:

• Manage employee turnover. Retailing has higher employee turnover than most other types of business. Some turnover in any organization is good. By bringing in new ideas, turnover heads off inbreeding and stagnation. Turnover can disrupt CNK, though. In the research findings, one of the top two facilitators of CNK was the customer having dealt with the employee over a period of time. Longer-term employees get more opportunity to learn what a store’s target markets are like and will like.
• Recognize and correct for the ways in which your target markets are different from your sales staff. The research found that CNK is less when there’s a large age discrepancy between the salesperson and that salesperson’s typical customers. This argues for hiring employees who are similar in age and other characteristics to your typical customers. You’ll want to be sure those employees also can learn retailing skills and that you obey antidiscrimination employment law. Working at it from the other direction, use the characteristics of your talented employees to help you attract customers like them. This expands the scope of your typical customers.

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