Service can be a determining factor when negotiating deals with foreign buyers. Exceptional service can mitigate your firm’s higher costs compared to the competition. Customers that are provided good service can become a loyal part of your customer base that is not apt to easily change due to lower prices being offered by your competitors. I recently was reminded of this business basic.
I went to one of the local men’s stores to shop for a new suit. As I wandered around the store searching for the proper sizes and styles, the clerk begrudgingly nodded at me. I struggled looking for the proper suit sizes and eventually had to bother this person to help me. He lumbered towards me, led me to my sizes and then walked back to his cash register. I selected two suits to try on. I liked one, but had questions regarding the fabric and the necessary alterations.
When I peeked out of the dressing room, the clerk was nowhere to be found. I trooped through the formal section in my socks, tripping over the extra fabric at the bottom of the suit’s trousers. I finally found the clerk, who told me he would be with me in a minute. After waiting 15 minutes, I took off the suit and left the store without a purchase.
As I walked down the sidewalk back to my vehicle, I remembered my suit-buying experience on my last trip to Tokyo, Japan. While on this trip, I had attended meetings during the morning and had about an hour around lunchtime to walk around the Ginza district. I happened to wander into a little “mom and pop” men’s clothing store. As I entered the front door, the five clerks that were working stopped what they were doing, bowed with a smile and welcomed me to the store in Japanese. This included the three clerks that were busy helping their customers with their selections. Immediately, two clerks asked me in elementary English how they could assist me. When I told them I wanted to see the suits, they proceeded to take every suit off of the racks that were my size. Along with the suits, they brought shirt, tie and pocket-handkerchief combinations. In a matter of three minutes, I had caused them to create a clothes jam in the middle of the aisle in front of the dressing room.
I felt bad for creating a mess by having this explosion of clothes spread out all over the place, and had a flashback from my childhood of my mother telling me not to go into the store and handle merchandise unless I was going to buy something. I still feel guilty going to a yard sale and rummaging through merchandise and leaving if I don’t buy something.
When I finally decided on a suit, I was informed that the normal turnaround to do the alterations was one day. I mentioned to the store attendants that this was okay, but that it would have been great to wear the suit to an event that I was attending that night. In less than thirty seconds, one attendant had made a phone call to an out-of-store tailor and guaranteed me that the suit would be ready later that afternoon. He asked me what time I would like to drop by to pick it up.
When I returned, the suit had been expertly altered and exquisitely packaged in a carrying case. I had not been charged for the special tailoring request. Additionally, the store manager had given me as gifts, two pocket-handkerchiefs as a token of his appreciation for my purchase. When I left, everybody in the store bowed and thanked me in Japanese for my patronage. The manager personally came up to me and asked me to please visit his store when I was again in Tokyo. He told me that the information about my size, color and style preferences would be entered into the store’s computer system so that he could better serve me during my next visit. I left feeling like a king.
The Japanese are famous for going to extremes to provide service for their customers. In the U.S., given budget constraints and the use of young, low-salaried and inexperienced employees in service jobs, this level of service may be difficult to achieve. However, we can use the Japanese example as a benchmark when considering service to our customers in a foreign country, and when attending to foreign customers that are visiting our facilities in the U.S.
There could exist in a target country a natural suspicion about buying foreign-made products, especially those that require guidance, service or instructions. The providing of exceptional service can make or break a company, which is trying to enter a foreign market. Many firms underestimate the service component of their international business, especially in countries where good service is expected.
Providing good service is often a major challenge due to logistics and costs. If a foreign customer has trouble with your product, who will fix it or resolve the situation? How will you develop and administer any warranties associated with your product line?
Do you offer to pay to ship it back to the U.S. or to an offshore repair plant? Do you contract with a third-party repair house in the foreign country to service your products? Several of the major foreign electronics manufacturers that have production operations in Mexico fund their own in-house repair centers for defective or returned items. Will you take this route and have a service support staff available that can solve problems in the native language?
You must take into account that in many developing nations, the regular mail is generally slow and/or unreliable. Will you pay for special shipping such as FedEx or UPS in order to have your customers return the defective items? This and the other costs of providing service must be calculated into your pro forma spreadsheets in order to estimate potential profits and losses when entering a foreign country.
If you don’t provide service for your products and a problem occurs, you may not only damage the reputation of your company, but you may face harassment and/or prosecution by the local government, which may be suspicious of foreign companies it envisions are preying on its citizens.
For businesses in the U.S. that want to attract more foreign buyers, know that many people from other countries expect the service they are accustomed to in their home country. Many foreign tourists who are made to feel comfortable will become loyal patrons of a particular hotel, shop or service-oriented business. You can bet your bottom dollar that I know where I’ll buy a suit the next time I’m in Tokyo.
