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How Topps Tiles keeps ahead of the game through effective recruitment, training and reward
What does the customer expect when visiting a Topps Tiles?
"Tiles are the kind of purchase you may make every five years and when it's likely to cost you £500 or £700 you expect to get good customer service and that's what Topps Tiles is about.
We have two main customer groups; trade who come in every day and retail where the customer makes infrequent purchases and often doesn't know where to start. They won't know how much a tile costs, the types of tiles they need, the brands, or the type of adhesive to use."
The Topps Difference
"That's why we have, what we call the Topps Difference. It's about having knowledgeable staff who give you great customer service and that's what we've been doing since 1963.
For this to happen, we need to recruit the right people in the first place and then arm them with the required knowledge. We need to be experts on tiles and wood and laminate flooring and everything that goes with that."
Recruit for attitude
"85% of our people work within the stores and like any other retailer we need to work hard to attract and retain the right talent.
Being greeted in a friendly manner as you come into the store is where the customer service starts and friendliness is what we first look for when we're recruiting people.
It may sound corny, but we recruit for attitude. If we can attract people who smile, are friendly and approachable, we'll give them what they need to be successful. We can always tell them about tiles and how to sell them."
Arm with knowledge
"We have four in-house trainers, two of whom focus on product knowledge, customer service and sales training. We have one management trainer and one who specifically looks after e-learning.
We've developed e-learning through necessity. We may have only three people in a store, so we don't have the luxury of being able to remove individuals for training. The challenge with e-learning is to make the experience as interesting as possible.
For example, we have a new course on adhesives; it doesn't sound important, but if you apply a poor adhesive it can result in the nicest of tiles falling off in a few months time. We sell a product called Bal and it's the Rolls-Royce of adhesives. It isn't the cheapest but we believe it's the best and so it's important we get the benefits across to the customer through the sales team.
Through e-learning we'll take the core message and put that into a course. We keep each course to just 20 minutes because of people's attention span and if it needs longer we'll do two or three courses on the same topic.
We keep interest through things like drag and click, which just makes it that bit more interactive. Accompanying each course is a quiz and the passing of quizzes is compulsory - courses have to be retaken until the required pass mark is obtained."
Reward success
"It's important we constantly look at how we reward people and there's certainly more we can do. I think our bonuses and commissions are quite generous, particularly when you get to store manager level. These of course help to drive service and performance.
Service is so important and Mystery Shopper scores are also linked to bonuses. We pay the bonuses each quarter so it stays more readily in people's minds.
The guys in store are sales people and it's important they're prepared to approach customers, find out what the project is and see how we can best help. Each person in store has a sales target to achieve each year and this awareness of numbers and targets works very well for us.
What advice would you give on how to attract or retain talent?
Practice what you preach. For example if you say ‘we're a slick operation, come and join us' and then don't demonstrate that in your recruitment process, it undermines the message.
Changing jobs is a big decision for anybody and if an individual goes for an interview and doesn't hear anything for days, they of course tell others and it can be very damaging to the employer brand.
One thing we've made a point of is making sure we send the job offer and contract out on the same day as the final interview and I am confident that's made a big difference to our offer/acceptance ratio."
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