Businesspeople in Ennis have asked a customer-care consultant to help revive commerce in the Co Clare town. CIAN TRAYNORpays a visit to see if it's working
IN A SMALL cafe in the heart of Ennis the heads of the Co Clare town’s development forum are laughing. “Do you think we’re cracked?” asks Aoife Madden, the forum’s chairwoman. “You mean we didn’t get that across?” adds Shane O’Neill, its vice-chairman, as he stifles a giggle.
When they began the forum, in 2008, to stand up for shop owners, people were sceptical. Then they campaigned successfully to scrap the council’s proposed rates hike on local businesses, and locals started listening. When the area’s prospective TDs were on the campaign trail earlier this year the likes of Madden and O’Neill made them commit, on camera, to meeting the development forum every three months. It’s a promise they’ve had to keep.
Now they’re calling for a back-to-basics overhaul of customer service that could help lift Co Clare out of recession and earn Ennis a reputation as the friendliest town in the country.
Already known as the boutique capital of Ireland, Ennis is something of an anomaly in that franchises have made little encroachment here. Instead the town’s narrow streets are cramped with old-fashioned storefronts still named after the proprietors. Many of these businesses have passed through generations.
Standing in front of the James Brohan hardware shop, its postcard-worthy front decked with brushes, bins and backpacks, O’Neill explains that Ennis has always been a market town where people enjoy “the craic of haggling”. So where did it go wrong?
“We got complacent,” says O’Neill, who has been running the Art Craft Company for 17 years. “Business flowed in no matter what you did. There weren’t enough places to park. Maybe we just took it all for granted. I don’t think we’ve lost our personality, but we’ve lost our customers.”
It was a two-way disconnection, says Madden, whose family have run Madden Furniture for 30 years. “We didn’t have time to chat with our customers, but they didn’t want to talk to you either. They were getting money on their mortgage for furniture, coming in and going: ‘I want that, that and that – and I want it by Friday.’ Now it’s six to eight visits for a single purchase.”
Being fenced in by a ring road and bypassed by a motorway where signs make little reference to Ennis haven’t helped. Many feel that the town’s advantages, such as its proximity to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher, have been forgotten. “There’s not much use in sticking our hand out to politicians, saying, ‘What can you do for us?’ We have to pull together and build on what we have: that natural ability Clare people have to interact with others,” says O’Neill.
With the help of the local chamber of commerce, Ennis Development Forum has been holding customer-care workshops that cover everything from cleanliness and clarity to bowling customers over with the wow factor and ever-present smiles.
It’s the little things: checking up on other shop owners, even if it means being brutally honest; directing customers towards competing shops, even if it means not seeing them return; collaborating with other businesses on promotional in-store events, even if it means giving away freebies and not selling a thing.
These are the teachings of Kathleen Sullivan, an American consultant experienced in customer care for multinationals like Unilever and Disney. She had worked with Ennis Chamber of Commerce before and was engaged to advise the town’s businesspeople. Sullivan, who lives between Ennis and Charleston, South Carolina (“the friendliest city in the US”), encouraged them to develop self-assessment checklists and draw up a Create the Magic charter.
“By God, there were rows over that charter,” says Madden. “But only because people are 100 per cent committed. If are going to be hung up in shops, they need to believe every word.”
O'Neill and Madden enthuse tirelessly about the campaign. To ensure that inspiration levels never dip they have promised to bring four motivational speakers to Ennis every year. At the launch of the Create the Magic charter on Tuesday, 180 people packed into the Old Ground Hotel for a talk by Bobby Kerr, the entrepreneur best known for his appearances on Dragons' Den.
“I think what they’re doing is fantastic,” Kerr said later. “If you go into Ennis and you’re made welcome in six different shops, if they can get that common vibe going, it’ll be tremendously powerful for those who do visit.”
There is some scepticism, however. At the Irish Shop, which sold music for 28 years before branching into souvenir crafts in 2009, its owner is supportive of the idea but understands reluctance elsewhere. “I suppose there have been other initiatives in the past where people were all gung-ho and enthusiastic at the start, and it tended to dwindle fast,” says David Woodford, who is too busy to attend the customer-care workshops, which cost €75.
Shane O’Neill admits that not everyone is clamouring to get on board. There are downtrodden businesses under pressure, and many would prefer to stick with what they know. “But that’s not working any more,” he says. “We’re putting ourselves out there, at the risk of ridicule, to show that this thing can work. Before, I would have thought I was doing my best for customers. But you’re never that good. You might not acknowledge the person as much as you should when they come in; you might just delay on the phone that little bit longer.”
So far the initiative is at the pilot stage, with 25 businesses and about 430 employees participating. The next round of workshops begins in July, and a target for tangible results has been set for October, which is when Retail Excellence Ireland will conduct “mystery shopping” tests, sending undercover assessors into shops across the town over several weeks.
“That will tell us whether we’re cracked or not,” says Madden, laughing again. “But to be successful in business you have to be a bit cracked.”
Magic? Ennis and the wow factor
How friendly is Ennis really? The Create the Magic initiative has been running since May 1st, so, in an unscientific survey, The Irish Timesasked a shopper to visit a cross section of participating businesses to test them by the campaign's self-assessment checklist.
Zest, a cafe and deli, may have been tipped off that an out-of-towner was sniffing around, asking strange questions, but the people there responded stoically to every demand, albeit without smiling. Queries about a local brand of “sea vegetables” (dried seaweed) were rewarded with a free bag.
A request for directions at SuperMac’s was met with an unsmiling, if accurate, account of how to get to the destination.
In Shane O’Neill’s Art Craft Company our shopper browsed and was acknowledged only with a glance, and not a particularly friendly one.
Staff at the Old Ground Hotel scored high in every category, and those at the Hallmark card shop were “exceedingly friendly”.
At Tom Mannion Travel, a brief wait preceded a profuse apology, and requests were dealt with perfectly. The only criticism related to the interior, which the shopper considered drab.
The results varied too much to register a definitive wow factor, but, all things considered, those in Ennis taking customer care seriously may not have far to go.
