Fast Talk: Smart Shops

Bobby Ukrop

President and CEO, Ukrop's Super Markets Inc.
Richmond, Virginia

MY PARENTS BUILT THIS BUSINESS on the golden rule, that you treat others the way you want to be treated. Part of that is about respect for one another. We try to take great care of our customers, and we can't do that until we take care of our associates.

We have four team values: Be honest, safe, helpful, and hardworking. If people who deal with customers every day in stores do these things, then the customer will have superior customer service. Anybody can say these things. Years ago, someone said to my brother, "Your people are so nice, I will go back to my company and tell people to be nice." Well, you can't just tell people to be nice. You have to make sure to deliver on that promise and to do what you say you are going to do.

These days, we have to spend more time helping employees with social skills. It doesn't come natural. It seems that there is less respect in our society for people. So we try to teach the importance of working hard and respecting other people and ourselves. We run a class called Values, which we have taught 427 times in 27 years. I remind people of what they are trying to do and how important they are to what we are doing.

Maybe it's easier for us as a small, private company. We don't have to worry about Wall Street. Don't get me wrong: We need to be profitable. But we also need to take care of our customers.

Pernille Spiers-Lopez

President, North America, IKEA
Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania

We want to be more accessible and more convenient. But we have a dilemma. In some stores, we have 40,000 to 50,000 visitors a week. Of course, that sort of volume is a great thing, but it also makes it tough to deliver what we promise.

If you ask people what frustrates them most about IKEA, they will tell you that they have to stand in line or that we don't have what they came for. Wait time is one of our biggest problems, especially on a busy Saturday. To address it, we have doubled the lane capacity. And at our busy stores, we have a technology called Linebusters--basically, scanners in the returns lines that make the process go faster. Together, they have produced dramatic improvements. At our Elizabeth, New Jersey, store, our highest-volume U.S. store, we cut the wait time by 40%.

We are constantly focusing on the inventory situation, from product development to retail. We now allow customers to check a store's stock online before they come in. We don't want people coming in if we don't have what they want. We have enormous inventory in our stores, and we need to do a better job of steering customers to what's in the store that we have for them to buy.

IKEA is a company about instant gratification. You come into the store and either bring home what you buy or have it delivered overnight on request. It's about being an attractive place to shop and having friendly and knowledgeable people to assist you. That's enough. Our goal is to stay with the simple things that people know us for. To focus on too much will only disappoint people.