Mr Lajwant Singh
Editor-in-Chief
Retailer

ONE of my peers recently wrote in a national daily that 'the customer is definitely not the king'. He argues that store employees complement this position. The author goes on to stress that the customer should come second because an organisation must first honour its employees as that is the first and the most intimate line of the customer. When employees are looked after well, he continues, they attract valued customers. He portrays the market as a mechanism to determine efficiency. The market does not know what is good or bad for the human. It is always the human being that comes first. In reference to the operation of a store, he says that employees are more important humans than customers.

While not totally disagreeing to his line of thought, I would still follow the age-old adage emphasising that 'the customer is king'. Employees, when well looked after, would definitely express their satisfaction with the organisation by working at their near-peak potential. However, here, we are circumventing the fact that there can be no term as 'market' without a customer.

Let me illustrate a typical situation that I (and I am sure that most of us must have) went through some time back. A month after I bought a strolly from a supposedly branded store, the product began to come apart. Upon bringing it to the notice of the concerned store employee, who served me then, I was not only deprived of the required attention and assurance of product exchange but snubbed for another customer who had just walked in. Though I gave him time to attend to me, there was no sign of, leave alone assurance, remorse even after the customer had left.
Today, whenever I am in that locality, I conveniently avoid the store. Had the management taken note of and stepped in to redress my grievance, it would have been a different story.

To enjoy true leverage, the people in any organisation must be productive. You develop productive people by training them effectively, by teaching them how to do
what you do so they can turn around and create the same results for themselves.

Email: editor@franchiseindia.com