Do you want fries with that?

 Mcdonalds … upsell or customer service ?

 One of the most famous sayings in retail upsell training is the “Do you want fried with that ?”

 The question to ponder is whether we can apply the same principle of upsell to create more revenue to upsell to create customer happiness ?

  I was at a large department store a few weeks ago. I purchased a makeup item for my wife.  paid for it and they handed me the item and the slip. An item that could fit easily in the palm of my hand without actually offering me the option of a bag. When I questioned them, Could I get a bag they said, oh we charge 15 cents for a bag.

 Herein lies the problem of customer service, especially evident in a large organization with thousands of employees. How do you ingrain the idea of “Do you want fries with that” in every single interaction and transaction that customers have with your organization? How do you create a culture of upsell for customer loyalty and not revenue.

 You may be thinking that I could have slipped the small item in a pocket.  To put it in context, I had no bags with me and I was in gym clothes (running shorts and shirt) carrying my phone and keys. It would be pretty evident that I did not have any pockets.

 From there, I went off to a bookstore where after spending almost half of the purchase at the department store, they asked me If I would like a bag. They were also super friendly and helpful.

I left there with a bag in which I put the item that I bought for my wife. My third stop along the way, for an even smaller purchase offered me a larger bag to put the previous items as well as theirs as they noticed that the small bag in my hand was bulging and they said “Let me give you a bigger bag for all your parcels”.

 Both of those were small stores. One of these was a franchise operation and the other a branch of a  large national chain. Each of them local management and a local feel to them.

 What struck me was the difference in attitude between these stores. The difference of recognition as part of the culture. Customer service and more specifically customer experience are today a large part of corporate culture.

 It has become increasingly evident that the large department store did not embrace a culture of excellence throughout the business and its employees, or at least did not communicate and educate a culture of excellence amongst its employees.

 Whereas the smaller local retailers really have this emphasis on customer service. Now one could argue that during the two years of the pandemic many retail operations were under a lot of pressure financially and now must go to an additional extreme to retain customers. That would make some level of sense if it was anywhere besides Western Australia. Given the almost zero COVID and the locked borders in Western Australia the impact on retail was not nearly as severe as other states and countries around the world that went into complete shutdown and lockdown.

 It comes to a willingness of senior management to commit to a culture of excellence. It comes down to a senior management committing excellence on board and not just giving lip service to the idea of a culture of excellence.

When I work with companies, I have found that the easiest way for senior management to engender and inculcate that level of culture is to live it themselves and openly display that they love that culture. The management need to eat, sleep, and breathe that not only in their dealings with the staff members but in the overall actions that they take. In today's world with the microscope of social media and the microscope of mobile phone cameras, everybody in leadership roles is under much more pressure to behave in a specific way that creates a level of trust and engagement from the team members and from customers. In fact it is about creating a level of trust and engagement from everybody who deals with that business in some form or fashion.

 And the concluding words.

 The concluding words are that as the world emerges from the pandemic, and as the world tries to find out what the new normal looks like, those organizations that have successfully created a culture of excellence create the future of their organization.

 Next time you are offered “do you want fries with that ?”  remember the enormity of the cultural effort that it took to build that into the culture of an organization the size of McDonalds. We need to remember the lesson of upselling to create a great customer experience and not only create revenue.

 Be heartened by the fact that you can do it too.