Employee Zeal Ignites Positive WOM

“Whatever you think of me right now, you’re right,” speaker Scott Stratten told the audience at the Opening General Session at CAMEX100 in New Orleans.

The same is true, he pointed out, for a customer’s perception of your store: however the customer regards your store, that’s the reality for them. Most perceptions are formed “by the most recent experience they had or heard and the most extreme experience they had or heard,” he said.

Stratten ran a viral marketing agency for many years with major brands as clients. He’s written six books, including UnMarketing, UnSelling, and UnBranding, “which make me 63 cents a copy.” He used humor to get his serious points across, cracking up the audience with a play-by-play description of how, back in the day, people used to make mixed tapes by cassette-recording songs played on the radio, “if only the deejay would shut up.”

Customer perception can be shaped by word of mouth, just another way to go viral. “Word of mouth is always happening, but what we want is good word of mouth,” Stratten said.

He talked about a Phoenix family who accidentally left their child’s stuffed animal at a Ritz-Carlton resort. Dad told the distraught child that “Joshie” had gone on an extended vacation. Meanwhile, a laundry worker at the resort found the stuffie and realized its importance. With the help of a loss prevention employee, they photographed Joshie on vacation—getting a massage, sunning poolside, hanging out at the bar with other stuffies, even checking monitors at the loss prevention office—and overnighted him back to the family. Dad immediately posted about the situation on social media, earning Ritz-Carlton a boatload of good will from everyone who saw the post.

The best thing about the story, Stratten said, was that it didn’t involve a company executive. Two lower-level employees took it upon themselves to fix a problem for a customer in a fun way. “All because of the people there,” he said. “I want to make somebody working in my store have the same pride in the institution.”

Ultimately, it’s the people working at the store who embody the store’s brand. “You’re the brand. You should have this up in your store,” Stratten said. But your store may not be giving off the right vibe.

“When you walk into a store, what’s the feeling?” he asked. He said he once visited a shopping mall on a Tuesday morning, thinking he’d get the best service because that’s a slow time. He visited a number of stores “and at every single one, I was either ignored or treated like an interruption. In two of the stores I went into, there was nobody,” he recounted.

Then he stopped at a shop selling fresh, handmade cosmetics and body care products. The cashier enthusiastically greeted him, ascertained he was a first-time visitor, and then personally showed him around the store.

“I walked out with $79 worth of soap,” he said.

“Are you passionate about the store, about the school?” he added. Employee passion is “contagious, that fire spreads with people,” he said.

These days, social media is the primary vehicle for word of mouth and potentially for revealing where employees may be passionate about their work, as the Ritz-Carlton anecdote showed. But sometimes older adults tend to disparage those younger for their social media habits.

“You don’t have to use social media, but don’t crap on anyone who does,” Stratten admonished. Older age cohorts may believe they know more by virtue of their lengthier experience, “but you have younger generations grown up on disruption. A lot of wisdom is based off times that don’t exist now,” he noted.

“The problem is saying this is the way it’s going to be because this is the way I’ve always done it,” he said. “All people want today is to be treated like a fellow adult.”

That generational bias can also come into play in other ways, such as encouraging employees to take initiative but then dismissing their ideas out of hand. “When ideas come to you, listen to them,” he said. “There are different things, different ways.”

The place to begin, he emphasized, is by asking employees—or even former employees—what they would recommend stopping, starting, or continue doing in the store.

“You don’t have any idea what it’s like to work for you. That’s not a negative statement, nor positive,” Stratten said. “If you want to know, that’s leadership. That’s how it starts.”