Similar to most of the specialty stores, The Body Shop adopts personalized approach to provide high quality service level and expertise to the customers. It is also the company’s main priority to serve the customers according to their needs and preferences. Over the years, The Body Shop has invested a substantial amount of resources and efforts into quality hiring to build an excellent group of service-oriented employees.
Unlike standardized approach, the employees at The Body Shop are encouraged to be creative and innovative in their service while continuously having a first-customer mindset and take initiative and ownership by providing “service from the heart” during interactions with customers so as to exceed expectations and foster customer loyalty. By treating customers as “friends”, the store staffs are able to gather meaningful information about individual unspoken needs and strategize effective personalized service offerings to satisfy customers.
The following are some value-added services offered by The Body Shop:
- Product demonstration
The staffs are encouraged to demonstrate and explain the proper product usage to the customer so as to interact and pass on product knowledge to customers. Free samples are given to customers to let them experience the product and its benefits. - Exclusive membership
The Body Shop Love Your Body™ provides more than just a loyalty card, it rewards customers with discounts, free gifts and special promotional privileges for members. Through this membership program, The Body Shop is able to gather customers information and monitor their buying behaviour in order to come up with attractive customized offerings. - Return privileges
Customers vary in skin condition and may be allergic to a particular skin care product. Hence, The Body Shop allows the customers to return the product and re-consult the employees to obtain suitable skin care products. - Personal shopper/Make-up artist
A personal shopper will be present in every store to assist and provide recommendations to help customers in their purchase decision. This experienced staff is also a professionally trained make-up artist to provide customers with enriching experience through complimentary “mini make-up” for customers who purchase a make-up set.
What does good customer service mean?
The Body Shop may encounter shortcomings such as high cost and inconsistency as it implements personalized approach in order to satisfy the customers. Below are what good customer service means to the company:
The Body Shop may encounter shortcomings such as high cost and inconsistency as it implements personalized approach in order to satisfy the customers. Below are what good customer service means to the company:
- Common service goals and objectives throughout the organization
In order to ensure good quality service, The Body Shop has to incur high cost for training the employees. In fact, it takes 3 days of training to equip employees with the product knowledge and emphasize on the service approach. The company finds it necessary for the employees to participate in training to better understand the company’s objectives and expectations for implementing such a specific customer service strategy. Employees can also clear their doubts and raise their concerns during training to lead to greater acceptance of the goals. Since it is more costly to acquire new customers through advertising and promotions than to retain the existing ones, The Body Shop is against the idea of heavy promotions with its long-term value on protecting the environment and instead prefers to gain a competitive advantage through quality customer service.
- Consistency and measurability
Since it is very difficult for employees to perform similar standard in their service, personalized service may lead to even more inconsistency than standardized service as a changing approach used by the sales associate may not be as effective as in the previous dealings to exceed customers’ expectations. Hence, The Body Shop regularly conducts surveys to its loyal customers (mainly Love Your Body™ card members) so as to measure its service goals, find out about their concerns and improvements that they expect to see in the service standard of The Body Shop. This effort proves to be an effective method to communicate with the customers as 3,615 customers participated in the survey conducted in 2009
Done by Fickey & Hee Yuan
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