Ch. 17 - Personal Selling and Sales Management

When reading through this chapter I noticed that the concepts and points made are really what drives retail. Having worked in other retails I know that capturing customer data and leveraging customer information is super important for the company for many reasons. But when it comes to UNIQLO, those two concepts are important and play a big role in our company but identifying customer relationships is what helps drive business in our stores.

For anyone that has ever visited a UNIQLO the employees that help will most likely ask you to fill out a comment card. That card asks you to rate your experience in the store from very satisfactory to unsatisfactory. Then on the bottom it asks you to write a comment on how you feel about the store or any commentary in general. This is also where if you have a problem or think an item can be improved you can write about it there. This helps a lot with identifying customer relationships. All those cards get read by the store managers and then get sent to the corporate office in Japan. It then gets read by the employees there and it helps the company change. For example, a lot of our customers come into our store to buy the Ultra- Light down jackets. Those Jackets would get wet and become a bit heavy for customers. And as we all know the whole point of that particular jacket is to be light. So when customers complained and wrote about how they felt about the Jacket, UNIQLO came through and created the Water Defenders. Which is the same Jacket with the same style and colors that everyone loves but is now water repellent.

The CEO of UNIQLO personally visit all of his stores at least once or twice a year to make sure the stores are properly displaying the clothes and that the employees are being as helpful as possible. Although the company has the self-help system they still make sure that the employees help and greet all customers. The reason why I mention this is because one of the ways the employees ask customers to fill out a comment card is through customer servicing. So for that moment if you do well with the customer then the comment will be good and will look good when it reaches Japan. And at the very end of the card it says to put in your email if you want to receive coupons. Which when you help a customer they will mostly likely put that in. Which helps with the whole capturing customer data.