​Ep 8: How to reduce overwhelm in any situation
I share my best tips to minimize you and your staff feeling overwhelmed in any situation. We are called on to elevate customer service and create a differentiated experience while also balancing the revenue that's ringing at the register with what we've budgeted for payroll. When this gets out of alignment, we can get overwhelmed and that in turn affects the customer experience. This is the fourth episode of four on the theme of retail management communication; it was preceded by episodes on the dangers of asking employees for favors, differences of opinion, and the dangers of thinking out loud.

In this episode:
  • Understanding how you generated sales compared to last year and what your revenue was compared to your plan
  • Getting a sense of how your business did without the noise of what happened on a day-to-day basis by looking at sales over time
  • Learning from the results you achieved
  • The misalignment that may exist between customer expectations and constrained resources
  • How overwhelm effects the customer experience
  • How one person being overwhelmed can affect the rest of the team
  • Having conversations about how to manage overwhelm
  • The variety of ways that we ask customers to wait when we’re overwhelmed
  • ​Employing the “X and Y” technique in both written and oral communication
  • Creating a thoughtful alternative for customers before you can work with them 1-to-1