A couple of incidents are worth highlighting. With Christmas approaching fast and shoppers starting to buy gifts that will not reach their recipients until 25th December or after many stores are varying their refund/exchange policy. At one check-out this week I observed the truly shocking.

A customer who had selected several items to purchase, queued in line waiting for the next available till had her selection scanned on to the till and then when being told how much to pay asked for a Christmas gift receipt. Unfortunately, the assistant had finished the sale by the time that she appreciated the customers request. From there things just went down hill rapidly.

The assistant asked a more experienced colleague how to produce the requested receipt and was told that the ‘seasonal gift receipt’ had to be requested before the sale was completed. When the customer asked if the sale could be reversed at the till and reentered as a new sale she was told that if she wanted a correct receipt she would have to go to ‘customer service’. This instruction was given in a very brutal manner, shocking.

So what went wrong? What came across to me was that the assistant serving this particular customer was new to the store and she had not had sufficient training to do her job correctly and there was no one supporting her. I think that any independent retailer with an epos system will know they are complex. On this occasion it was the customer who got really poor service as the check-out staff did not have the power to amend the regular receipt with any form of ‘authorised amendment’.

The second store again at the check-out a customer produced a situation that went beyond the ability/knowledge of not just one assistant but two more that also got involved. The first assistant admitted that what the customer was asking was something that happens very in frequently. This meant that the situation was beyond the assistant’s knowledge. Again the staff training was at fault, not the staff member themselves.

So how can independent retailers learn from my observations?

The issue that clearly comes across is that over the next few weeks up to Christmas (and beyond) is to ensure that their staff all understand their role, are fully trained and have the authority to deal with customer facing issues. Not only that, by ensuring that your business doesn’t have rules and policies that cause these sort of issues at your check-out. Focusing on the customer experience in your shop you are going to be on a winner.

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Hackney retailer Siva Kandiah could only watch on television as his convenience store was torn apart by looters on the night of August 8th, 2011.

Listen to him speaking to Retail Express about what happened, his heartbreak as the business he has built for the last eleven years was destroyed, and hear first-hand a taster of the community spirit that will hopefully help him rebuild.

Retailers and suppliers gathered last night at a meeting of the London, Southern, and Kent NFRN Districts in Colliers Wood, South London.

The meeting was an opportunity for retailers to meet with suppliers including Mars, Booker and Imperial Tobacco as well as an opportunity to relax and have a meal with other retailers.

The new Chief Executive of the NFRN also addressed members and set out how excited he was to be working with the organisation.

Last September one of our deliverers who had been working for us for five years with a great record of reliability was struggling to find a job or even know what he wanted to do. We fortunately had a vacancy for a full time position so offered him the job.

To say that the two years of A level education had been a good experience for him would be an overstatement. I can best describe him as being ‘zombiefied’. He felt his three A Levels of low grades meant that he was a failure and he lacked ‘get up and go’. To wake him up we gave him first two, then three paper rounds to do before his day’s work, all done by bike. It did the trick and soon after the New Year he was back to one round and now he has been reliieved of that duty.

Around the shop he works hard and is good with customers, but until recently he was reluctant to do anything that was like ‘school work’. I understood his feelings and have given him a great deal of one-to-one training. Recently I felt that it was time to test the water and introduce him to the Basic Food Hygiene training. We have a program on our back office computer for this purpose so our staff can get this qualification.

After giving our latest assistant a deadline to get through this and encouraging him along the way he has now completed the final test successfully and I think this will be a big self esteem builder for him. Now what next for him? NVQ2, customer service maybe?

This has to be balanced against extra stock, staffing, new summer lines and not forgetting we all need time off to spend with family and friends.

The trouble is in the last month I seem to have failed to do either. I’m just not performing or perhaps don’t feel as organised as I should and at the end of every day I don’t seem to have done the task I set out to do. Mrs Jones would like a special order of pumpkin oil, sadly Mrs Watkins’s grandson is in hospital, Booker have delivered 3 hours later than normal, Cadbury rep has called in and two other reps have “just called in”, all distracting away from the day’s work including my utter weakness, checking emails.

So I started off on Monday with my juggling act promise to:

1. Write down my top three priorities at the start of the day
2. Review the days priorities at 2pm, (it may have changed)
3. Only check emails 5 times a day for 10 minutes rather than every 20 minutes and being distracted
4. Decide a time I will leave work every day
5. Ask myself do I need to do this task or can someone else do it

Come Wednesday only seven of my nine priorities have been completed, between you and me I still have a weakness for email.

Paul (not his real name) has just popped in to tell me he has just had an interview for a store manger’s post at a Co-operative store. I know some will already be thinking that’s not very exciting, but you did not hear the pride in his voice or know the journey he has been on.

Seven years ago I employed Paul to keep the shop tidy and do a few handy man jobs, which we were not keeping on top of. Paul had been unemployed for two years after a work place injury. He was attending hundreds of interviews and failing to secure a post. He had no confidence or self esteem.

I don’t think Paul smiled for the first 12 months, but gradually he opened up to myself and the staff giving us glimpses of his less than happy childhood. Gradually he grew in confidence.

We offered him the chance to do an NVQ 2 in Customer Services which took him to the next level. He interacted with customers and began to genuinely smile, this followed on with an NVQ in Retail and Paul was on his way. The work whilst easy for some was not for Paul, he often wrote up his coursework with a dictionary which could take hours, but he was determined. We encouraged him every step of the way.

Sadly we had no more roles to challenge him and with our blessing he got a part time job at a Co-operative store, which naturally progressed to a full time post when they saw the potential that we saw in him.

So Paul’s just popped in to tell me: a) he got a chance to be interviewed for the Store Manager’s Role b) he loved the interview, even if he doesn’t get the job and told them a few home truths (which I won’t print here, but let’s say I hope they listen to him because I know he’s right) c) on the internal grading system at the co-op he is more qualified than the current deputy store manager, because he did the NVQs with us d) thank us for giving him a chance to show his potential

He had the biggest smile on his face and wanted to tell me he was doing well, and that’s what I want for my staff – for them to succeed.

In his letter he stated that for the audit he would need a view of the following documents:

• Fire risk assessment
• Procedures clearly demonstrating effective fire safety management which should include company policy, an effective emergency management plan, defined responsibilities and the appointment of fire marshals where deemed appropriate.
• Evidence of staff training and the carrying out of fire drills.
• Records of testing and maintenance of fire-fighting equipment, all fire safety systems including fire alarms, emergency lighting (where applicable), etc.

Now, considering that the Fire Safety Order has a penalty scale up to 10% of a businesses annual turnover there are serious teeth that bite in the event of failure. The first thing I thought was that we did react to the Order when it came in to force in October 2006 when we wrote a fire risk assessment and emergency plan. We also do train new staff about how we minimise the risk of fire, but somehow we had let the record keeping slip during the intervening years. What to do was the next question?

The first action was to read the paperwork that we had from 2006; while we had the risk assessment and an emergency plan, there was little other evidence. As we have not had a fire in the 22 years we have run our shop I felt that it would make no sense to (excuse the pun), treat this as a fire fighting exercise. Looking at the Fire Safety officers audit list I worked methodically through it to correct our deficiencies. I searched the Internet for a model company policy and quickly found one that suited our needs. A little editing and it became a guide to build a fire safety file around.

First ever fire drill

I revisited the Fire Risk Assessment that I had written in 2006, refreshed it to reflect our current practices and placed the resulting pages in our Fire Safety ring binder. Next we looked at staff training, I wrote a script and ran through it with every member of our staff. I got each one to sign and date a copy of the training script as a record and placed this in the binder. Next, I organised a Fire Drill, the first we had in the period of our ownership (shocking). I took the opportunity of a short period when we had an empty shop to hold an evacuation drill to give our staff the experience. We have had to do real life evacuations on many occasions before when we have suffered power cuts.

Next I moved to records and evidence of testing and maintenance of our fire-fighting equipment. We have a contract with Chubb Fire who service our two extinguishers each year and provide a certificate for this. We also arrange to have an annual Portable Appliance Test undertaken each April and this year we also had a Periodic Inspection report compiled by our electrician. It all went into our binder.

In addition to this I created a Fire Safety Action Record sheet for the binder and we were ready for the Fire Officer’s visit.

See how the visit went in part two of Steve’s fire safety blog, next week.

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The Sunday that we discovered the crime was the day before we went on our recent holiday so we spent an hour plus investigating the issue and then put it aside until we returned from holiday. On the next available Sunday when the young man came to work I interviewed him on his arrival and explained that we had evidence of his dishonesty. I showed him the screen shots from our CCTV that indicated the various items of stock that he was either eating or drinking. His initial reaction was that he had simply forgotten to pay for them and was very sorry. I then told him that we had evidence from other weeks because our system holds four weeks recordings and he was doing similar things every week.

I allowed this information to sink in and asked him what he felt I should do about it. He said that he would accept what ever I decided. My wife and I had decided that dismissal for gross misconduct was the correct action on our part. The interview went according to my expectation and the young man left our employment there and then. After the interview I wrote a personal statement as a record of the conversation that we had for our files.

Should I have brought in the police and prosecuted him? Having had three weeks to consider our action we felt that the penalty of the loss of his job and his friends knowing why was sufficient and from the feedback I have received from one or two of his friends he is mortified that he had been so stupid.

We have amongst our customers over 30 retired police officers of various ranks, one of them is a retired sergeant who regularly uses our shop so I asked him if he felt our actions were appropriate. It is comforting to know that he felt our course of action was the correct one.

Over the nearly two years that we had employed him it is difficult to know how much our former employee had stolen from us or when his dishonesty started. It would appear to be in the low hundreds rather than the thousands of pounds. We had no evidence that he stole money and he did assure me that this had not been the case. After more than 30 years in retail management this is the first time I have had to dismiss a member of staff for dishonesty. Let’s hope its the last.

The shock I received was on the final section of the questionnaire. On a scale of 1 to 10 staff members scored themselves very poorly across 18 skill categories including time management, delegation, IT, commercial judgement, creativity and steadiness under pressure.

While we can’t all score a 10 every time, my staff rated themselves poorly in areas where I know they perform strongly. This lead me to thinking either I never praise them enough, or they are lacking in self-confidence, which surprises me as they are highly capable.

Either way the exercise shows me I still have a long way to go in giving feedback to staff so they know they are doing a good job.  The target I’m taking for myself from the review is to ensure staff rate themselves more highly in future.

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To begin with the previous owners of our shop returned for a couple of weeks a year for several years until they found that they were too old to carry on. With a young family my wife and I were very pleased with this arrangement.

We found our next team of relief managers though our local NFRN branch. The husband and wife team had been active members of the branch and when they sold their shop offered their expertise for holiday cover. They were very good and honest people, but again age and family commitments caught up with them and we had to find a new relief manager.

This time again it was by being an active Federation member that we found Paul. He and his wife had sold their shop and set up a holiday relief service. Once again I had known the person we were going to leave in charge of our business and was comfortable that he would do a good job. It also helped that I knew some of the store owners that he had as clients and was able to talk to them about the quality of the service. My wife and I after nearly 10 years of leaving Paul in charge know that we will return with the store intact and operating as though we had not left it. Our customers see Paul as part of our team and are pleased that we get regular breaks away from our business.

In owner-operated business like ours it can be difficult to get away, but I have found that having been an active member of the NFRN has brought unexpected benefits.

• Smile at customers
• Welcome them to your door
• Be the best you can be at customer service and don’t be afraid to be loyal to your instincts regarding your own customer-base

It never sounds hard the way it is explained by Mary, or by the trainers in her workshops. In short, KISS, Keep It Simple Silly.

Remember why you started out in business, and reignite that passion in your customers. Customers want to have a shop they can be loyal to and boast about.

Well, last Friday (Good Friday wasn’t it fantastic!) I had a most glorious surprise. A supplier gave me a bottle of single malt whisky, now some of you may be thinking “Yuk”, however I very much enjoy a spot of whisky and not just for medicinal purposes.

Once I had got over the shock and delight, it made me realise that throughout the two minute conversations over the last 15 months when delivering he had been listening – it is the only way he would know I enjoyed a single malt! What’s more, I had helped him to gain a new customer and he was saying thank you.

It was then the grey cloud appeared how many times, just like customers, have I taken suppliers for granted. Good suppliers that deliver on time with 100% stock availability are what our industry needs but do we ever thank them? One of my suppliers has on average an 85% availability on a good day, however they no longer substitute (much to my relief) and with a different delivery driver every week as the only interface I have with the company it’s no wonder we don’t have a great relationship.

We had a very brisk trading, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the shop was starting to look a little bare, even though I had ordered 50% more the previous week. When I closed at noon on Sunday, I trundled off to Bookers on Easter Sunday to replenish my shelves for the Monday Bank Holiday rush. Remembering what had happened to me on the Friday I treated all seven staff in store to a box of orangeTwiglets, because without them working on Sunday I couldn’t offer my customers what they wanted on Monday. Now just to see the smile on their faces knowing they were appreciated was definitely worth it but knowing I had said thank you to those who help me trade also made me feel good too.

So next Tuesday my egg supplier will be receiving some almond slices as they did an emergency delivery Saturday morning, because profit from increased trade can only happen when suppliers supply.