Mickey Drexler hates emails and memos but loves to communicate face to face or over the phone. He prefers personal interactions so he can be sure that others are listening to him.
When Drexler was hired as the new president of Gap Inc’s Stores Division in 1983, his first order of business was to fire everyone in the complaint division because they took six weeks to respond to complaints. He states that every person in the company was now the complaint department.
When Drexler joined Gap Inc, its three store brands (The Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy) had only 550 stores and was in deep trouble. By the mid-2000s, they had 4,250 stores and Drexler had built the clothing retailer into a nine billion dollar a year business by simply making customer service more than a slogan. “Think and act like the customer” is Gap Inc’s operating motto.
The company uses two-way communication between customers and staff as well as between employees and management. Mickey Drexler is always open to speaking to customers in stores, in elevators, or wherever. He has even been known to stop and ask 12-year-old kids on the street about his product line. The result of all this communication helped Gap Inc. changed their clothing lines from upscale clothes that were not selling well to simple, more casual clothes. Drexler likes to say that he invented “Casual Friday”.
He knows that a customer’s first exposure to the chain’s clothing is with the window display so he paid particular attention to them. Thinking like the customer, he made sure signs were readable and instructed his employees to made sure that they would greet a customer within 30 seconds of entering the department.
To keep up with employees, Mickey Drexler would start calling them as early as 6:30 while he was working out on his treadmill. If they were not there, he would leave them a lengthy voice mail message they could not ignore. Instead of meeting behind closed doors, he preferred to meet in the hallway so he could respond quickly and foster an atmosphere of openness.
Mickey Drexler was focused on thinking like the customer and those communications needed to be person to person in real-time.
What can you learn from Mickey Drexler that you can apply to your business?
