The other day I stood in a shoe store for about 15 minutes.
I was interested in one of two pairs of shoes, I hadn’t purchased casual shoes for about 5 years. It was taking a while, and I was about to walk up to the register, but I decided to run and experiment. So I stood there, and waited.
3 minutes… 5 minutes… I picked them up, looked at the soles… inspected the tongue…
At the 12 minute mark or so, one of the staff broke out of their conversation about their other friend (who hopefully wasn’t in the room based on the nature of the conversation), and came to ask if she could help.
Once we engaged, things improved dramatically and eventually I left with the shoes I was after.
Anyway, the interest I had was in where we often allocate our time and energy relative to what our values are.
In retail, almost without a doubt, a value is customer service, customer satisfaction, or customer engagement… This sits pretty high (no customer satisfaction and you’re done…)
Yet it strikes me how often the customer is ignored or taken for granted as time and energy is allocated into other areas – gossip, watching the in-store TV…
I began to think of this in my own life – how much time was actually going into where I want to head, and how much time is actually being squandered in other areas?
Of course not a new concept, but something that continually seems to deserve attention.
