That Indian consumers are a growing breed is now known. India has a severe shortage of trained, knowledgeable staff to serve this growing set of consumers is also now being widely recognized.

Why then do organizations spend the time, effort and money to train these scarce resources, only to not empower them? Baffling.

The current formula for retail, especially luxury retail in India is for an organization to tie up with as many global brands as possible and then go on a store opening spree.

Global brands hungry for a slice of the Indian market are more than a game to tie up with such local enterprises. After all, this is seen as a “ low cost” entry option for many brands. Aldo, Tie Rack are examples of such tie-ups.

Typically, in India, these global brands have poor visibility of how consumers and potential consumers interact with their product, how the brand is perceived and what is the actual consumer experience at the storefront.

The focus currently is, therefore, to “sell” with very little thought on either creating loyalty or even a positive consumer experience.

When a potential customer walks into an Aldo store ( as did this writer) and all but decides on a significantly large purchase and then realizes that he would have to fork out another Rs 1000 for shoe inners because the store does not have a size that fits!

The expectation is that the store salesperson would waive off the Rs 1000( which works out to less than 5% of the potential bill) and realizes this cannot be done.

The salesperson nor the Manager are empowered to take this decision, it has to come from H.O!

If you wish to build customer loyalty that you can be rightly proud of, you have to start off by empowering your team. You end up with twin benefits :

• Build an empowered, motivated, involved workforce,
• Garner lasting customer loyalty

This is CX -101 !!