The 10-4 rule for interacting with customers

Target is an American retailer that has been in the doldrums recently. In an attempt to improve the experience that customers have in its stores, it is instituting a new programme known as “10-4”. If a shopper comes within ten feet of a Target employee, staff are meant to “smile, make eye contact, wave, and use friendly, approachable and welcoming body language”. If customers come within four feet, employees should “personally greet the guest, smile and initiate a warm, helpful interaction”.

Learning about the 10-4 programme elicits several reactions in quick succession. The instinctive reaction is to fear for the future of humanity. Do employees also need instructions on how to smile, you wonder? (“Draw the mouth upwards, parting your lips and baring your teeth until the customer either reciprocates or asks if you are feeling unwell.”) What are they supposed to do if a shopper insists on holding a position five feet away: keep waving? At zero feet, are things getting a little too friendly? And so on.

A more considered reaction is to understand the logic of the new policy. Poor customer service is bad for business. Most shoppers would prefer an inauthentic show of friendliness than a genuine display of surliness. Setting clear expectations for how employees ought to behave is a good thing.

After all, Target is not doing anything especially unusual. Walmart, another American retailer, has its own ten-feet rule, encouraging its shop workers to greet customers who get that close. Some hoteliers operate a 15-5 rule, in which staff are expected to smile when someone gets within 15 feet and say “hello” when they are five feet away. In hotels and resorts, these invisible perimeters are sometimes referred to as the “zone of hospitality”, the customer-service equivalent of sovereign air space. If you accidentally stray into this zone, you will suffer the consequences.

The last and enduring reaction is to think that this kind of thing makes sense only in the right context. Rules can be enforced in stupid and less stupid ways. Maximalist interpretations of the 10-4 rule insist that it applies through glass: after all, there’s nothing more welcoming than having people mouthing “Can I help you?” through a shop window. Some say it also applies to customers who are behind you, which presumably means that employees should rotate while they are doing their job, like a grinning doner kebab.

But even reasonable interpretations of policies like 10-4 risk worsening the customer experience in three ways. The first—somewhat ironically, given how much customer-experience types like to go on about personalisation—is because people are different. Only a very few individuals crave incivility when they go into a shop or restaurant. But plenty of them would like to just get on with the activity at hand, without having to watch how far they are from a member of staff in case they get sucked into a conversation. (The restaurant equivalent of this problem is being asked every other minute if you are enjoying your meal. Answer: “I might if I were given the opportunity to eat it.”) One way to make customers feel special is to cater to their preferences. Those preferences may include not having to wave when they are trying to shop.

There are “moments of truth” in customer interactions, times when loyalties can be won or lost. For some businesses, such as the most upscale hotels, every interaction needs to be perfect. But for many others, such moments come less often. Insisting that everything is a moment of truth risks undermining other aspects of a firm’s offering.

That’s because employees are often busy doing other valuable things—bringing stock onto the shop floor or picking items for online orders. With enough capacity in the system, workers can afford to break from these tasks. Without sufficient slack, time spent greeting every customer may show up in botched online orders or empty shelves.

The final way policies like 10-4 can backfire is by making employees feel murderous. There are reams of research to show that autonomy is correlated with job satisfaction. Giving people precise instructions on how to behave when someone is a certain distance away risks making grumpy workers even grumpier.

Target’s intentions are spot-on. Employees should always be friendly to customers. But high-quality service depends on the overall environment rather than a specific set of behaviours. It requires judgment, not rules. It should be a target, not a prescription. ■