November/December 2022 - 25

MANAGEMENT
the necessary safety requirements may provide the clarity
sought by the homeowner staring at the numerous shelves
of chemical products, wondering where to even begin.
Or perhaps you have someone on your staff who has
horticultural training and is a wealth of knowledge
and experience but is uncomfortable interacting with
customers. Perhaps they can serve as a mentor to staff
with less horticultural experience but who are more at
ease with the retail sales environment.
Essential Staff Skills
An alarming finding of the survey revealed that 28%
of the respondents provide no landscape management
training to their seasonal staff. Given the heavy reliance of
many garden centers on seasonal staff during the spring
season when customer traffic is at its peak, this situation
creates the recognizable risk that an inquiring customer
may encounter an untrained staff member.
It may be store practice to have seasonal staff defer
to permanent or specifically trained staff, but high
customer traffic levels on a sunny spring Saturday can
quickly derail this approach. Your permanent staff may
be already occupied with customers of their own and
with other assigned responsibilities that keep the garden
center running.
If a customer comes to your garden center looking
for information - perhaps after a sour experience at
another retailer - and encounters a staff member who
is either uninterested or unable to provide the desired
information, will that customer return? Are you willing to
take that chance?
This does not at all imply that all your seasonal staff
should be trained to answer every customer inquiry.
However, some form of training that familiarizes your
seasonal staff with potential questions in their area of
responsibility increases the probability of both customer
and staff satisfaction.
Social Sells
When polled regarding their use of digital platforms,
respondents overwhelmingly indicated that Facebook and
Instagram were the electronic means used most often to
connect with their customers. This was the case for either
answering customer landscape management inquiries or
providing educational information on topics of interest,
such as pollinator gardens or landscape design.
This response mirrors data in the Pew Research Center
report, " Social Media Use in 2021, " published in
April 2021. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are the
three most frequently used social media platforms by
those polled by the Pew study. However, this same data
also revealed significant differences in social media usage
between age cohorts. For instance, 71% of Americans aged
18 to 29 frequently use Instagram, while usage by those
over the age of 65 drops to 13%.
Data from UNL's IGC survey showed that less than 20%
of IGCs polled use YouTube as a part of their social media
offerings even though over 80% of Americans frequently
use it, including 49% of those over 65 years old. The
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November/December 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November/December 2022
