So last time, we talked about what went wrong during the pet food recalls, and how things really could have gone better. In this entry, I want to talk about what we, as independent retailers, can do when a crisis happens.

I’d love to say this was all my idea, but it wasn’t. I got my first clue right upside the head from an angry customer. She’d called the store and wanted to talk to me — here’s what she had to say:

“How come,” she demanded, “You can call me each and every time Iams goes on sale, but you don’t give me one call to let me know that the food I’ve been giving my dogs is safe or not?”

“Because,” I had to tell her, “I’m a knucklehead! And the minute I get off of the phone, I’m going to start doing exactly that!”

That’s the beauty of database marketing and making full use of your POS system. With our Club Dave program, we keep track of what our customers buy. We have all of their contact information. It’s a natural way to respond to a crisis: get out in front of the problem and be proactive. If your customers are affected, call them and let them know! If they’re safe, call and let them know that too.

Yes, you are going to spend a gazillion hours on the phone. We wore out our phone lines during the recall! But it was well worth it, because we care about our customers and their dogs, and we wanted them to know if they were safe or not.

This can work for any retailer, in any industry. It’s critical that we keep track of our customers and their buying habits for any number of reasons, but none of those reasons are as important as being able to communicate with the customer in a time of crisis. This is how we earn the trust and loyalty of our customers!

As an added note, make a point to keep all of your employees informed about what’s going on! There’s a reason for this. Your employees don’t magically disappear when they’re not at work! They go home, they go out, they shop in the community, they pick up their kids from school — and your customers see them. There’s a better than small chance that your customers will approach your employees for the ‘inside scoop’ about the situation. If your employees are clueless about what’s going on, you’re going to have a difficult time convincing the customer that you can be trusted!

Finally, now that a year has elapsed, it’s clear that Iams, Nutro, and the other companies that were invovled in the pet food recall have lost customers. You’d think they’d reach out to these customers, see why they’ve left, and how they could recapture that business. But they haven’t — probably because a tiny little company like Proctor and Gamble simply doesn’t have any money for marketing.

But as independent retailers, we do — and we have to!

I have to tell you, never in thirty plus years of doing business have I ever seen major corporations handle a public relations event so poorly! This recall was massive: all of the major pet food companies were affected. Proctor and Gamble, Nutro, Purina, Hills — every one had to pull products. And the way these major companies handled the situation? It was so bad as to be mind boggling!

The news about the recall broke on a Friday evening. Saturday morning, I went into the store and called my Nutro rep. I wanted to know what I was in for. Are you ready for what he said to me?

“I was waiting for your call!”

He was just as clueless as I was. None of the local representatives had any information from their corporate headquarters about what was happening. They didn’t have any more of a clue than I did.

Now, you have to understand: it was the wheat gluten in canned food that caused the problems. Only canned food. But due to the sensationalistic news coverage the recall received, the customer didn’t know that. They thought every type of pet food had been affected by the recall, and they were panicking.

You would think that Purina, Iams, Hills, and these other huge corporations would provide signage, detailing the fact that all the dry foods were still safe to feed to pets.

You would be wrong.

You would think that vendors who had 8 feet of shelf space at any given store, only to have 4 feet worth of product pulled by the recall, would rush to ship replacement product!

You would be wrong. My store, and tons of stores just like mine, had all these gaping holes on the shelves, with no products to fill them.

All of the manufacturers just crawled into a shell and hid. The most interesting thing is the huge opportunity all of these major companies missed. I’ve got a database of thousands of customers. Pet Co, Pet Smart and other national chains have databases that contain many multiples of that! You would think that the manufacturers would approach us, asking to use our databases to reach out to customers and assure them of the safety of their products, offer up critical information, and provide contact details.

You, sadly, would be wrong.

In the next post, we’re dong to talk about the value of a damage control policy, and what you can do when your industry hands you a crisis to handle!

I’m on the road a lot, giving talks and presentations to other independent retailers and professionals in the pet industry and pet food industry. Now, if you’re going to know one thing about me, you should know that technology is absolutely not my thing. I’m in the breakdown lane on the information super highway. The only reason I have a blog is I have a magic blogging gnome!

But I was going to give a great presentation, and I wanted to record it. So I went out to buy a digital recorder. I went to Tweeters , whose tagline at that time was “A Boatload of Knowledge”

I drove past several of Tweeter’s competitors; past the Circuit City and the Best Buy. I knew I’d need expert advice, because I didn’t have a clue!

So I get to Tweeter’s. Guess what? Nobody there had a clue about digital recorders. Not the first idea. But they worked with me on it. We futzed around, until I had some kind of idea how to operate the thing.

Still, I was a little miffed. These guys touted themselves as the expert, and they couldn’t show me how to use their merchandise! Had these employees been trained, they could have easily demonstrated how the digital recorder works. Not only that, but they could have explained the difference between different digital recorders, recommend which one was best for me, and helped me make a more informed purchase.

But that’s not the kicker. Oh no. That didn’t come until I was back at my hotel room, minutes before I was scheduled to appear. That’s when I discovered that my great new digitial recorder didn’t have any batteries! Not only didn’t it not have batteries, but it took some special kind of battery I couldn’t just get from the hotel gift shop!

That’s when the boatload of knowledge sank.

Employee training is critical to ensure not only that the customer gets what they want, but that they get what they need! We don’t want our customers getting home only to discover they need batteries, cables, or other vital component that our crew could have easily reminded them of. We have to make sure that our crew remembers, no matter what industry we’re in, to ensure that the customer has everything they need to enjoy their purchase.

One of the most important things I learned is the value of employee training. Now, if you’re like me, your skeptical meter just went off, because nine times out of ten, when someone wants to talk to you about employee training, it involves you having to buy something and spend a gazillion dollars.

This was a little different, though. This time, I learned about the value of getting your front line employees invested in the decision making process. If you want to make good retail decisions, decisions that are going to make your customers happy, it’s not a bad idea to actually talk to the people who talk to your customers: your front line employees. It’s your cashiers, your crew members, your csrs who actually interact with the people you want to please.

The more equipped they are to do a good job, the better results you’re going to have.

I know, duh.

But here’s the other part. Some of you might know this: we have our own line of Dog Food One of the things we carry is Delectable Dinners, a wet food. We need to offer more flavors.

Now, what’s the best way to decide what these flavors are going to be?

It’s not like I can ask a dog. Well, I can, but they don’t say much.

Instead, why don’t I have my crew talk with my customers, have them do a survey, and let the customers tell me what they want to buy? So simple, it’s brilliant: the first rule in retail is to give the customer what they want.

How does this relate to training? I want the new dog food flavors to be a big deal. I want my crew to be excited and enthused about it! If they’re excited, the customers will be excited: excited customers buy.

How do I get my guys excited? Training. I can’t afford to send everyone, else I would, but I’m going to send two or three crew members out to the facility where our dog food is made. They’re going to have the behind the scenes tour, the real inside scoop on dog food manufacturing. We’re going to video the whole thing, so the rest of my crew can see it too. This will help my crew feel connected to the new product: they were integral in deciding what was going to be made, they know how it’s made, and when the food finally arrives, they’re going to do an awesome job selling it.

There you go. The beauty of training, and involving your employees in the decision making process. Let me knwo what you think, and what you’d like me to talk about!

I’ve been meaning to create a blog for a while now.  Blogging’s a great way to connect with people, and I’m hoping to use this platform to find people who are interested in the same things I am: independent retailing, marketing, running a small business, and doing everything I can to make my life — and the lives of my employees! — better every day.

A little background. Not too much, I don’t want you to get sick of me right off the bat! Anyway, I’m the owner of Dave’s Soda and Pet City , a mini-chain of pet & soda stores. We’re located in Western Massachusetts, and I’m thrilled to say we manage to hold our own each and every day in a world of huge chains and deep discounters. We’ve been doing it for close to 30 years, and if I’ve got anything to say about it, we’ll be doing it for 30 more!

Right now I’m fired up because I just got back from The Global Retail Marketing Association Conference I learned a ton of great stuff when I was there, real hands on immediately applicable stuff we can all start using right away to improve our businesses. Throughout this week, I’m going to be sharing some tips I learned there. I hope you find them helpful, and I’d love to talk to you about them further, so comment away!

Gary Hamel, who Fortune magazine calls the world’s leader on business strategy, presented. One of the things he talked about, and I personally think this was great, is how to get employee suggestions.

Now, I’ve asked my employees for suggestions over the years. Let me tell you, opening up that suggestion box is a sure fire way to get 8,000,000 suggestions. However, how many of the suggestions are any good? How many are great suggestions but impossible to use? How many are guaranteed to put you right out of business within a year?

If you’re a business owner, you know what I’m talking about. You also know that there’s only so many hours in the day, and finding time to sort through 8,000,000 suggestions in the hopes of finding one or two good ones is not an easy thing to do.

Hamel’s suggestion is this: Before any employee submits a suggestion, they first have to run it by and get approval of the suggestion — from another employee! There’s a format for suggestions:

Here’s what we should do
Here’s why we should do it
Here’s what it will cost
Here’s how it will improve the business

This just resonates with me as a practical, useful way to handle employee suggestions. I’d love to hear what you think of the idea!

I’ll be back to share more. Thanks for stopping by!