Retail Blog

or How to charge (but not charge) for Customer Service

A lot of people like to cite bottled water as the analog for the modern post-Napster music business, drawing comparisons between the stream of free music available via means both legal and illegal and tap water. The bottled water market is extremely interesting in relation to music sales, but not in the way this initial comparison intends. After all, water has been basically free forever and only in the last three decades did people start paying for it. Music has gone in the other direction as labels and other content providers struggle on different ways to monetize.

Customer service, as I discussed in the last column, is the most important thing about the record store model of selling music, the very thing that differentiates your store from both online physical retailers and the digital realm. So here you are, getting ready for your holiday season, haggling with labels and distributors over price point so you can compete with digital and you’re giving away the greatest asset you have, the full added value of your personalized relationships and product expertise, for free. I don’t blame you, really, because this is the way it’s always been done. But when the quality of what’s free diminishes when consumed from its most readily available source (in this case, online), added value can be offered at a premium. Like bottled water.

For years, higher end department stores, like Barney’s and Saks, have offered personal shopping services, sometimes complimentary. Barney’s copy says “Claim your style! Are you looking for a wardrobe adjustment, the right accessory to complete your look or, perhaps, that elusive perfect gift? Not to worry. Our complimentary personal shoppers will make your experience one to remember, taking the guesswork out and putting the style in. Whether we come to you with fitters in tow or you come to us to relax in our private shopping space, our world becomes yours. Call ahead to have a selection pulled for your private presentation or walk among the many levels of unparalleled luxury with your shopper at your side. The personal experience also gives you first dibs on trunk shows, personal appearances and special events. Even corporate gifts are not beyond our range. Come, experience true luxury at Barneys New York...private luxury, personal luxury.”

Not exactly the right tone for a record store, but the important thing to notice is that they’re not just advertising and selling clothing and apparel. They are selling their service and rewarding their customers for utilizing it. Of course, their tickets are higher and margins are greater, but they understand that the more integrated their customers are with their services, the greater their customer retention and sales opportunities.

We can actually look at a different industry with a similar model right in San Francisco’s own backyard. Each year, people descend by the thousands on the wine country of Napa and Sonoma, travelling from winery to winery for wine tastings. Vintners commonly provide four to eight wines to taste, all laid out on a tasting menu, with a few varietals not on the menu stashed close by for “special” customers or prime opportunities that come up through conversation. High end or more established wineries tend to offer these tastings complimentary because they can make up for it in their sales margin. More and more wineries are charging a modest fee for wine tastings at the outset, fully refundable with purchase.

If your store is really looking to offer an unparalleled music shopping experience for your customers, then this experience is what you should be selling. While Record Store Day and Black Friday bring an extraordinary amount of business to your store, they’re a little light on the shopping experience as your staff become slaves to the register, crowd control, restocking, etc. It is, however, a prime opportunity to sell them on this experience that you offer the rest of the year. You can do so by combining these two concepts – the personal shopping session and the wine tasting- into your store’s Personal Listening Sessions. The basic idea is that you charge, say, $15 ($10 for Record Store Day specials) for a personalized music consultation with the fee being fully refundable with purchase. You can ask each person a few musical questions by phone or in person and schedule an appointment with the most appropriate sales person in your store (based on availability). You then put together a group of releases based on the customer’s parameters (making sure to pull them from stock so they don’t sell prior to the actual appointment) and allow the customer to sample them at the time of the appointment while discussing your own selection process with him/her. The net result is that you are still giving away your services, but guaranteeing a sale before you invest the time.

Most people may not buy such a service for themselves, but everyone knows someone who is overwhelmed by selection, has no time to research, is always bugging friends about what to listen to, or (the ultimate faux pas) just has taste that could use a little broadening or updating. The Personal Listening Session is like a hugely improved gift certificate. Instead of a sterile $15 to spend at a record store, you’re selling a personalized experience which comes with a story for the recipient to take back to the giver. In fact, because this is essentially a gift certificate with the added value of customer service heavily underlined, once you determine that it’s a gift for someone, the amount can be for as much as the giver is willing to spend while retaining the increased value of the experience. Smarter stores can keep a customer database so you have a record of people’s tastes, when they were last in, what was recommended and what was purchased. The hope is that the experience is positive enough that people return and you’re just as prepared, knowledgeable and professional as ever. The Personal Listening Session takes the concept of NARM’s decades old “Give the gift of music” slogan and runs with it. Music isn’t just music! It’s the experience, some of it shared, some of it solitary, some of it just peripheral, but, regardless, the experience is something a record store can sell all day long.

Also, big shout out goes to Anna Lundy of Grimey’s in Nashville who, a week after my last blog post, totally proved me right on Facebook (as you can see from the graphic above).

The greatest value that records stores have to offer the world is the people who work at them. It’s not price or selection or product, it’s expertise and customer service. It is the one thing that digital does not offer music consumers and, like Nirvana lifting their favorite elements of the Pixies, Sonic Youth and R.E.M. and repeating them over and over and over again, I believe this is exactly what record stores should underline and emphasize over and over and over again. You might think this blog is just stating the obvious. Sometimes the obvious hasn’t been spoken in so long, it might not be as obvious to others as you remember it being to you.

The record store people I know are largely bright, funny and passionate about music, but let’s face it: the surly, snooty record store employee (see Jack Black in High Fidelity for reference) has become something of an archetype, whether they’re a crotchety old stoner, a misanthropic punk, a bitchy house music nut or an arrogant indie rocker/arrogant jazz breather/arrogant classical snob. We all know or have known people like this. I think most of us would like to see this go away and that has everything to do with the conversations you and your co-workers are having with your customers.

As one piece of the puzzle, we built this site so, at the very least, everyone who works at your store knows what the records you’re carrying sound like (preferably before they even arrive at the store). By becoming experts of your inventory, you can change the shopping experience for your customers. No record store can ever compete with the selection that digital offers, and while this ocean of music might offer infinite discovery, most people are drowning in it. As Adam Klein, CEO of eMusic said at the Bandwidth Conference recently, “All you can eat gives you indigestion.” The recognition of this, that you and your co-workers can play a valuable role as curators and navigators, is huge. Again, maybe obvious to you, but I have to ask if this shift in the market place has affected the way you speak to your customers or what you ask them. Has “Can I help you find something?” or “Are you finding everything okay?” been replaced with “What are you listening to?” or “What kind of music are you missing in your life?”

Everything you can do to underline that expertise has value to your store and customer retention. We designed what we’re calling our microbranding program to do just that. You may have noticed the “Submit a quote” option in the marketing request portion of each release. Microbranding allows us to create commercial grade customizable hype stickers in very small quantities. We can include your store logo and staff quotes right there with press quotes as well as regional sales drivers like radio charting or local press that we could never dream of using on national materials. You, the store, become the avenue of development and once again, your staff are the experts, right up there with Pitchfork and MOJO and Spin. There’s an example at the top of this post (although Dan from End of an Ear is as modest as ever and decided against an actual quote).

The very nature of this program is to give a name to everyone in your store and associate that name with expertise. The majority of us got into this business because we formed relationships with music at a young age. That relationship is often tied in with the people who introduced or sold us the music. This is something you can give to your customers that digital cannot. Again, obvious, but it still should be said.

There are many great ways to capitalize further on this, many of them already in use. Amoeba publishes a Music We Like zine. Aquarius handwrites reviews and puts them on releases as well as in their longstanding email list. Other Music is also known for a compelling and eclectic email list. Stinkweeds published a Best of 2010 book which compiled staff and customer reviews, using the new Minibuk format (introduced by owner Kimber Lanning). End of An Ear video tapes their new arrivals, flipping one record at a time. While these opinions and customer education are really important, there are other ways to cultivate the more personal nature of your service.

One idea we had is for each sales person in the store to have his/her own business card with their own unique store-specific Twitter feed and email address. The majority of your customers have mobile phones. Wire them to you. Businesses often treat their customers to one voice, but every record store is a collection of voices and we all know what a strange and cool notoriety working in a record store can offer. Every street date can be an exchange and reminder of your presence as well as an expression of many voices. If each employee can cultivate a clientele based on taste and level of service, you can do business with people even when they’re not in the store. Tying these emails to SMS function could allow you to presell releases before the person even arrives. Let’s look at Kat from Fictional Records.

Kat tweets:
FictionalKat: So excited about the new My Goodness CD coming in Tuesday. It rocks! Email fictionalkat@gmail.com w/ yr # and I’ll hold one for you.

Customer Jerry emails Kat, she gets an alert on her phone (or the email gets redirected to someone near a computer) and she calls him back to get his credit card info. If she knows Jerry, maybe she just sets one aside and emails him back. Jerry might not have ever come in this week. You can do this with collectibles, store events, etc. It’s just an idea, so if it doesn’t appeal to you, don’t sweat it. I’ve got more. Regardless, your feedback is welcome.

Next time, I’ll tell you about our Personal Shopping Session idea.
 

Hi Record Stores. I’m happy about your day, that it’s worked out so well, that people were lining up around the block and many of you posted the strongest sales days in the history of your stores. I’m happy that reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated. I’m grateful that many of you have found creative ways to bring in more revenue, be it through novelties, books, Japanese sodas, etc.

Sit down with me. I have to lay some honesty down on you. I know things have been tough with less money, less attention, fewer sales reps. I see you out there hustling for that big label co-op money. I see you struggling to get your buying done, to push your social networking, to budget and manage your inventory. I know you’re pressing distributors and labels to lower prices so you can compete with digital. Times are hard, but we’ve all got to change. Record Store Day aside (and, yeah, we’re going to talk about RSD one of these days soon), most of the changes made at stores have been reactive instead of proactive. Reactive is often how the bigger side of the industry deals with things – “Digital? Run there!” – given their well-documented conservatism regarding everything from new formats to, I don’t know, listing costs on packing slips. But adopting a reactive strategy without an eye towards evolution is very much selling yourselves – and everything you can do that digital can’t - short. The lines have sure been blurred between major and indie, but the biggest distinction is the way we develop acts. You want some love from your indie labels? I’m here for you. I’ve been thinking about you for a long, long time now and I’ve been thinking about how much I need you and how much I want things to be right between us. It’s going to take a little work, but we’re tied together, you and me. We can do this together. If your store is doing better than ever year round, then feel free to tell me to take my new-fangled ideas and shove them. For the rest of you – which is to say most of you – you have to change.

Last year, prior to being hired to run Spindle when I was just the Absolutely Kosher guy, I read the NYT bestseller “Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard” by Fast Company columnists Chip & Dan Heath. Nobody’s written “Street Date: How to Save the Record Store” yet, so the title alone appealed to me. How much harder could things be for labels like mine or the stores who traditionally developed our bands & records with us? The book outlines three spheres in which to recognize and experiment with change: the elephant, the rider and the path. That is to say the id (your gut feeling/cravings/natural inclinations), the superego (your logical, reasoned mind), and the environment of the people involved (in our case, either the music business as a whole or even just your store, depending on how you choose to examine it). It’s a great book, but don’t expect an easy solution to your woes within its pages. In fact, don’t expect that from anywhere. There isn’t one solution. There are fifty or more, but none of them is the panacea, the catch-all, cure-all savior you’ve been praying for. And because life after digital is complex enough and demands that you do more than one thing differently than you already do them, I might lose at least half of you before I finish this blog post. But still, a fella’s got to try.

This blog and the efforts of Spindle Music very much aspire to be the serialized version of “Street Date: How to Save the Record Store” or whatever else you’d title it. I’d like to write it with you, Record Stores. Our tools, all of which have been designed with careful consideration for your workflow, and all the info about our records will be behind the account log-in because we want to recognize you as professionals with the privileges of esteemed membership, but I’m hoping to keep this blog in front of it. If you’d like things to get even a little bit better and are willing to work with us to make that happen, let’s do this. Next blog post: Why any Record Store clerk is better for your customers than the digital juggernaut.