The Manual
“Make sure very few tills are manned. Punters will have to queue for longer, but so what? The longer they’re there, the more time they have to pick up the high-margin items near the check-outs.”
Someone passed me a link to this article the other day. The Manual smacks of a fake, but I’m sure a more subtle version of it does exist somewhere. The underlying theme is, of course, making money and who doesn’t want that? Even in service industries you can get the same effect: cut the phone lines to your local branches and introduce a call centre, disenfranchise your staff, keep the face-to-face interaction as far removed from the actual business processes as possible, don’t allow even management to be able to make the smallest decisions, etc. All will minimise responsibility and maximise profits.
So let’s say you can ignore the misery and suffering of your customers as you follow the steps laid out in the manual – then why not do it?
It’s only the structure of these businesses that makes The Manual work. If you’ve not got that structure or setup the manual will work in exactly the opposite way – you will lose customers and won’t make any money.
I hope that small businesses in the recession can survive with their focus on customer service.
I hope that the “Price alone” ethos of the customer doesn’t allow smaller businesses to go under.
Yes, that is the bitter irony of this downturn – that the more people become cost-conscious the more they are driven towards just the sort of big businesses that give us the sort of service outlined in The Manual.