Unless you really are a sole proprietor, you have a least one other person on your staff who needs to know everything you know.  After all, you can’t be in your store all the time. And you don’t want customer service to suffer just because you are off on a buying trip, doing the book work, or even better, out enjoying the spring sunshine.

We use an employee newsletter to keep our staff up to date on coming events, new arrivals, and personnel news.  Each of our newsletters starts out with birthday greetings and an acknowledgement of annual employment anniversaries.  

When a new employee is added to our staff, I do a brief interview to introduce him or her to the other members of our team.  I try to point out a few interests that will help get conversation going when they meet.

 Those of us who go to trade shows also regularly share our discoveries through the newsletter.  It helps get everyone excited about the new products that will be coming in, and gives them some selling points for the items we’re expecting.

 Having a template on the computer for the newsletter, as well as a file of clip art, makes it a fairly quick process to put together the newsletter.  We used to print an individual copy for each employee and put it with our biweekly paychecks, however now most of our employees use direct deposit.

 So in keeping with the times, we’ve started sending the newsletter out via e-mail as a PDF.  We also post a copy in a plexiglass frame behind the checkout counter where everyone can see it.   There is a notebook with past copies available for easy reference, and we archive those introducing new employees so that we can look back on the day when they were not yet seasoned members of our team.  Keeping everyone in the loop makes them all better employees, which means we can give the best customer service possible.

 

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder