Trust Your Culture

The OSAT Renaissance Project Ep #7
November 16, 2014

Trust Your Culture

Good Morning and Welcome to The OSAT Renaissance Project  - your Daily Boost of energy, excitement and information to help lead OSAT higher for the absolute benefit of our customers!

Today I want to talk about culture - the culture of your store and how we need to trust it.

We often get soooo keyed up about the comments we received and…we want you to…in a sense - you know we send out the comments just about everyday…we want you to read them, to react to them but I don’t want an overreaction to them.

By that I mean “trust your culture”

Once you establish a culture of success - once you establish a culture that allows for success in your store - then, as you read the comments, you look for trends in the comments - you don’t look at the outliers and react to those.

What I mean by that is that you may have a comment that reads:

“Store was dirty and the customer service is always awful.”

Then the very next comment is:

“Man I love shopping in this store, this is my store and it is always clean and the service is fantastic!”

Two contrary comments

Which comment do you latch on to?

Obviously you will probably latch on to the very good comment and totally discount the bad one…human nature.  And you may allow this to cloud your ability to trust OSAT

I bet the truth is somewhere in-between but my point of this is that you are going to get comments that seem odd.  for example, You are going to get comments that you are out of stock on ad items all the time.

But do you see a trend in the comments - do you see a trend in the out of stock on ad comments?

Certainly as you read the outlier comment you want to take a look and see and really decide where you are at on that but if you know you’re pretty good on it then you file it away for another time.

And then if it comes up again and again…you have a trend and then you will have to delve into it deeper and solve the issue.

But far to often we are way too reactionary to the comments and it clouds our vision about OSAT.

I want to uncloud our vision and I want us to have a positive reaction to OSAT.  I am worried that sometimes when we hear OSAT it conjures up negative thoughts.

I don’t want this.  I want OSAT to be a positive thing.

I want us to trust our culture - trust the culture in the store and allow that culture to grow OSAT organically.

I know nobody likes a “When I used to do it” story but I’m going to tell you one anyway…so my apologies before I begin.

At 443 when I was running it we always called ourselves ‘The Happiest Place on Earth”…that was the culture we tried to establish.  Did we ever get there - of course not.  You can probably think of many other places happier than a grocery store in Loganville, Georgia but that was the mindset we had.  The Happiest Place on Earth was the culture that we tried to establish and I think we went a pretty good ways toward establishing it because our OSAT was generally not bad.

And by establishing that culture we when we got some bad comments we analyzed them, we looked at them but we didn’t over-react to them and we didn’t let them get us down.  We didn’t let them cloud our view.

We also didn’t get too super-keyed up over the really good comments either because we knew the truth - we knew what we had to work on…we knew ourselves.

We looked at the comments for trends…reacted when we needed to but we mostly trusted the culture - that we were “The Happiest Place on Earth” and we continued to strive to become the Happiest Place on Earth and watched the OSAT grow organically.

That’s all I am asking you guys to do - establish a culture in your store…be true to that culture and then trust that culture as you are working your way through OSAT and allow it to grow in your store.

Let’s Celebrate some Great People today!

461 - Maurice was so friendly and smiled - that is very important to me.  Makes my day!

354 - The cashier Sarah was very professional and very customer service oriented.  She was very polite and knew her job well.  She is an asset to this establishment…a very important person to keep.

488 - enjoy the friendliness of this store.  This time Reginald and Sanika spoke, smiled and are always helpful with everything I need.  Reginald checked me out and as usual was wonderful.  And, especially Sanika at the customer service desk - what a great attitude, esp when people are mean and impatient.  She and Reginald are both assets to this store.

370 - the produce associate Abdould was very polite and helpful

679 - Friendly cashier and bagger - Stephanie and Cheryl were great!

445 - the cashier had excellent customer service.  Hat’s off to Breanna

212 - my checkout clerk, Valerie, was really courteous and friendly

461 - I accidentally left $50 at self-checkout and Ms. Corliss found the money.  She told me to bring my receipt in and she would have the money.  I did and Ms. Corliss had told customer service to expect me.  I am so thankful for the honest and responsible staff - especially Ms. Corliss.  Thank you!

461 - Jasmine P the cashier was very pleasant

And there are a lot of great comments that didn’t mention associates by name.

Thank you!

Tomorrow we start with you guys - the stores - taking over a portion of the program.

I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on how to grow OSAT.  The suggested topic is Acknowledgement and how we can improve it but you can speak on anything related to OSAT that you wish.

The Line-up is:

Monday - 651
Tuesday - 370
Wednesday - 436
Thursday - 483
Friday - 488
Saturday - 212