Tips for Building Good Relationships with Your Retail Employees

When Best Buy employee John Pershing graduated from college in 1996, he was fully prepared to unpin his employee ID tag for good and embark on a career in architecture. But that all changed after a talk with his store manager.

"I had even given my two weeks' notice," he says. "But then my supervisor took me aside and said, ‘I'm not going to make a pitch for you to stay, but I want you to know that I believe in you, we believe in you and here's what the future of Best Buy looks like.'"

The store manager then went into detail about what Pershing contributed to the store every day. "His humility about it, combined with the specifics about my contributions, really helped change my mind," Pershing says.

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Pershing stayed, and today he's the company's vice president of retail operations, responsible for implementing this same type of empathetic approach to store management, an approach he feels boils down to one key ingredient: Relationships.

"The key to building relationships is through real conversations with customers," he says. "Store managers need to stand outside and talk to customers as they walk out. A lot of retailers do customer and employee surveys and benchmark that way, and that's fine, but what's really amazing is how many insights you can get just by having direct, personal conversations with the people you're trying to serve. It cuts through to the root of everything you want to know about the customer experience."

satish ............ 21 July