I saw the list of the 10 companies with the lowest customer satisfaction and I wasn’t surprised to see Wal-Mart leading the pack.
I’ve been working on a project about creating a culture of customer service in any industry and the 3 keys that all highly customer centric companies share are:
* Service starts at the top
* Companies are always challenging themselves to get better at service
* The companies have created a culture where talent wants to work there.
If you look at Wal-Mart, you see that they fail at all 3 things.
* The top quality that Wal-Mart hopes to attain is lowest price.
* Because Wal-Mart is focused on price at all costs, service isn’t ever in the equation.
* Having seen numerous stories over the years about Wal-Mart employees working 2 or 3 jobs to get by, it is obvious that most of Wal-Mart’s employees…at least in the retail operations, look at this as an employer of last resort and it seems likely that they don’t feel highly valued. This is a combination for a company’s employees to not provide the best service.