“…Your customers are people, and people want more communication during times of change, not less.”

Over the past year we’ve worked with our share of companies going through some tough times, and at times that has meant helping them with the tough job of closing some of their locations.   We’ve learned a lot watching some very talented people manage this incredibly difficult change in their companies.   A few lessons:

You’re closing a location, not the market. Your customers are people, and people want more communication during times of change, not less.

Make an extra effort to include in your messaging not just that you’re closing and that you’d love to see your customers at your location down the street, but also that you’d love to hear their thoughts on the changes taking place.  You’ll be surprised at the things you’ll hear.

Set the story straight – from the start.  Responding to customer feedback in the weeks before and after a store closes (we continue accepting feedback about a location even weeks after it’s closed) is vital.   Even more important, however, is to reach back into your database of customer contact information – including all the contact information received on Customerville – and set the story straight from the start about why you’re closing.  How well you manage closing will reflect on your brand elsewhere.  (In some cases it’s not practical to announce the closing ahead of time.  In that case, be prepared on the day of the closure.)  It’s extremely important that customers understand that your brand remains vital and healthy, even though that particular location didn’t work out.  Drop me an email if you’d like some best practices.

Be a class act even when it’s rough. Sooner or later, every company is faced with closing a location and bidding farewell to hardworking associates who can’t be placed elsewhere in the organization.  Here’s a great idea for district field management we’d love to pass along.

Take a little time to quickly scan back through customer comments, print off Customer-grams mentioning the departing employee by name and give the comments to the departing crew members.

Presenting these to those team members who have lost their jobs provides a needed lift when their spirits are down.  It shows them that you’re on their side even though your job means closing their location and provides that employee with something like a reference letter on steroids.  And in today’s economy, this is just the type of recognition that will help your crew land on their feet.  And a reputation for managing this process conscientiously won’t hurt you in the future the next time you’re hiring. 

It’s no surprise that front-line managers love Customerville.  After all, the company was founded by one.   Here’s the story.

Back in 2001, things were pretty hectic around my house.  My wife, Beth, and I had two young kids – ages 3 and 2 – and we were pregnant with our third.  Beth’s regular visits to our fabulous neighborhood Gymboree Play & Music Center was the lynchpin of her weekly schedule.  The kids loved the interactive play and music classes, and Beth relished the grown-up time with the other moms.

So you can imagine her response when the franchise owners announced that they were going out of business and closing the doors.  Beth got very quiet – the dangerous kind which instantly puts any husband on high alert – and suggested that we might think about buying it.

The classes were awesome, but the business wasn’t well run.  We bought the business and our turnaround efforts met with big success.  We were thrilled, and within a year Beth and I had made arrangements to purchase the other local Gymborees.

And that’s where things got complex. Running one location was easy.  Though Beth and I never taught classes, we were always around and the customers knew us.  If something wasn’t quite right, they’d take us aside and politely tell us what needed to change.

But, as any regional manager will tell you, once we had multiple stores it was a lot harder.  Those were our names on the lease, and our money going into building out the locations.  We were responsible.  Problem was, we weren’t the people in front of all those customers every day.  That vital role is played by an hourly employee – usually a very talented young person with plenty of energy but a lot less experience.

So we devised a means of asking our customers to share their feedback on the things we deemed most vital to our success as a business.  It was pretty high tech.  We created paper guest experience surveys, stuck stamps on them and left them out for customers to take home and mail to us.

We couldn’t believe how many of the cards came back in! Every day the mailman handed me a big stack of those yellow cards.  Week in and week out, customers wanted to share their feedback.  It was fantastic, but getting the results tabulated was slow and cumbersome.  Worse, by the time we got the information into the hands of our employees, it was old.

Now that we knew what we wanted, our next step was to go online and see if we couldn’t find a tool to automate this process.  How hard could that be?  As it happened, it was very hard.  Then (and now), the solutions available were overly complex, over built and overly expensive.

There was only one thing to do: We needed to hire a programmer and build it for ourselves.

Next Week: A product is born…sketched on the back of an Alaska Airlines a barf bag.