Magic for Malls - How You Can Teach Incredible Customer Service

I’ve spent over 45 years in the world of marketing with about 30 of them in foodservice and retail, where I both advised businesses and owned several.

I never thought to write about these experiences until I got a call to help mentor some Sixth Form students at a local Academy, anxious to learn some practical tips in market research methodology. As is so often the case, the experience taught me more than I taught the students.

I learned that these young people had the mathematical skills to handle most of the formulae and models they’d encounter but seemed unable or unwilling to embrace alternative strategies to problem solving.

It was as if the pressure of learning the ‘right’ answers and avoiding the ‘wrong’ ones had pushed them into a binary world where options on most decisions boiled down to two.

This struck a familiar chord as years before I had created a training programme titled ‘Magic™’ which was a radical fusion of techniques designed to liberate the thinking of entry-level retail staff.

The catalyst for its creation was the 1990 opening of Meadowhall, a 1+million square foot shopping centre on the edge of Sheffield.

The aim was to create a service experience for shoppers, which would match the vision and quality of the centre, despite the absence of a well-trained cadre of retail assistants.

This was achieved and Meadowhall received accolade after accolade for service excellence including awards from the BBC, Daily Telegraph and the industry organisation the British Council of Shopping Centres.

The media awards were especially notable as this was the first shopping centre, as opposed to a retailer, to be so recognised.

The ‘Magic™’ programme was so powerful that it was adopted by a raft of shopping centre and retail clients in the UK, Germany and Ireland with the support of their respective governments and senior retail groups.

In all, Magic™now has over 30,000 ‘graduates’, progressing their careers in shopping centres and retail chains.

Attending the launch of a new centre in Cork, Mahon Point, following the success of the Magic programme in Liffey Valley Centre in Dublin, the Taoiseach pointed to me and jokingly remarked ‘That’s the Scotsman that brought the Magic to Dublin and now he’s brought it to Cork’.

After a visit to the local Portslade Academy in 2015, I came to the conclusion Magic™ could also be of great value to school leavers.

During a pilot session with Year 11 students, it became clear that the techniques so far applied in ‘Magic™’ to older delegates were equally effective with these young people. The teaching team there encouraged me to put pen to paper and this book is the product of their encouragement.

It’s in three parts.

The first, ‘The Origins of Magic™’, presents original research produced by my consultancy company ‘Business Blueprints’1 across the period 1990 - 2014. Uniquely, the research highlights the views of both shoppers and the staff who serve them.

The essence of the findings is that there is a chasm of misunderstanding between service givers and service receivers and that service givers have accumulated inhibiting baggage from their school years, which needs to be discarded before they can properly get to grips with the delivery of service skills.

The second part, ‘Let’s Make Magic’ takes the form of a course handbook where delegates learn new skills in communication, memory enhancement, lateral thinking and much more. Most importantly, it allows them to learn that ‘it’ all starts with ‘belief’ and that failure is a necessary prelude to finding success in life and at work.

The third part deals with ‘Measuring Magic’, or how to keep the ‘Magic’ going by creating and applying service measurement techniques used by shopping centres, food service and retail organisations.

 

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

-Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

 

Its genesis, like most ‘creative’ outcomes was the identification of a problem, for which there were no existing solutions and which involved the connection of a series of exercises. This led through trial and error to an outcome, which was pretty well balanced and very effective.

It remains a work in progress and is being constantly refined but this is the first time that I’ve attempted to lay it out in such a way that it can be shared and, if you like what you read, can be disseminated.

When I completed the first draft of this book, my editor asked me to include a story about an occasion when I overcame my own fear of failure and achieved a good result. He also said ‘make sure it’s not too dull’, a tall request in my case.

Whilst working on the CentrO Oberhausen project in Germany, I was tasked with planning the catering and foodservice line-up and we were all delighted to have attracted Planet Hollywood to their first opening in Germany.

The centre owner, Eddie Healey, was approached by the famous Michael Kuntz, who had adapted Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musicals for Germany, where they had earned great critical success.

His idea was to team up with a peripatetic operation called ‘Pomp, Duck and Circumstance’ which was a dinner-cabaret concept set in a Belgian Mirror Tent.

Kuntz’s idea was to create a musical event called ‘Dreams’ with nightclub seating, where dinner would be served whilst performers acted out various dream scenarios.

Unknown to the audience, during the preperformance drinks, waiting staff mingling with them would make small talk and probe for any dreams they might have.

This feedback was then discussed with the director and three audience members would be selected, then seated at specially adapted tables.

As the lights went down, the selected members would be deftly replaced by members of the cast, who would quickly put their party’s mind at rest by describing, quietly, what was planned.

If, for example, one ‘volunteer’ had always dreamed of being a pop star, they would be dressed and made-up accordingly and then introduced to the audience as to who they were, that is another member of the audience but with a dream and what’s more a dream that was going to come true that night, in front of them.

Pause for cheers and applause.

To develop the idea of premiering the show at CentrO, Eddie was invited to Vienna, where Michael Kuntz’s musical ‘Elizabeth’ was a long-running, award-winning show.

As I was the director responsible for the leisure line-up, I was dispatched to meet them.

They were charm personified and although they had been assured by my Client that I was empowered to act on his behalf, I could sense that their preference would have been to discuss the project with the centre owner.

Nevertheless, they took me to the show whence we repaired to the Hotel Bristol where, of course, the multi-starred Michelin chef was to present a 7-course ‘Menu Surprise’ to the VIPS. Well, two VIPS, their wives and me. Towards the end of the meal, I excused myself for a comfort break.

Passing through the lobby, I spied none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger holding court to a transfixed group of young people, whom I took to be students.

In the lavatory, I struggled with what to do next. Schwarzenegger was one of the fronting celebrities for Planet Hollywood, which was to open at CentrO.

So he might be prepared to engage me in conversation.

On the other hand he might not be aware of the opening given that it was about nine months away and he would inevitably have other priorities.

 

"Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realise how close they were to success before they gave up."

-Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

 

On the third hand, he was clearly engaged in conversation with a group of eager acolytes, who would probably not welcome my interruption.

As I started on the fourth hand, I realised that I was prevaricating because I was frightened that my approach would end in failure.

So falling back on my own ‘Magic™’ training I asked myself the consequences of failure.

He was not in his armoured Terminator costume nor, as far as I could see, was he armed, so my life was not in imminent danger.

The worst I reckoned was a short, polite rebuff so off I went. I approached the Great Man with a cheery smile, hand outstretched and in my best (not very good) German introduced myself, made him aware how much we were looking forward to the Planet Hollywood opening and how pleased I was to meet him.

His reaction was extraordinary.

In that accent with which we have become so familiar, he told his group how pleased he was to be part of an exciting project to rejuvenate a part of the Ruhr which had suffered severe war damage and the subsequent loss of steel-making jobs.

Finishing, he asked me why I was in Vienna and I explained my VIP dinner to which he exclaimed; ‘Power dining! Can I meet them?’

So off I scuttled...