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Last week, Paul EcEnany posted about his unpleasant experience at Kohl’s (see: Hurricane Kohl’s at Hee-Haw Marketing). As a shopper, he wasn’t pleased with what he saw when he walked around the store. He didn’t just leave the store and vow to no longer shop there, he took photos with his cameraphone and went home to blog about it.

Oh how the times have changed.

In this generation, we’re now used to real-time access to everything. The Internet keeps changing the way we go about our daily routines. If you had an unpleasant shopping experience in the past, you would be resigned to phone calls and word of mouth. Maybe not much has changed, except phones have been replaced with e-mail and blogs and chatrooms allow your word of mouth to go from your neighbor to the world.

How come major retailers aren’t reacting to this quicker?

Paul’s tepid e-mail response from Kohl’s corporate is a great example of why retailers need to adapt their thinking to put themselves into positions where they can communicate with customers more efficiently. After Paul wrote his post, links have appeared all throughout the blogosphere, including Seth’s blog and Brand Experience Lab. Tomorrow, David Polinchock from Brand Experience Lab is part of a forum, Strategic Branding Influence, at the National Retail Federation trade show, and he’s using Kohl’s as an example.

Mark Collier has a great post over at Daily Fix called Where Are The Community Evangelists?

He says:

If Kohls had a community evangelist, s/he could have discovered Paul’s blog post, and then reached out to him, and served as a facilitator to make sure that Paul’s experience, and his concerns, were voiced to Kohls’ management. That way, the “right people” could have been made aware of the condition of the stores that their customers are visiting, and then addressed correcting those issues. Finding out about such problems from a community evangelist sure beats finding out about them as a member of the audience of the keynote at a National Retail Federation conference.

When are the big retailers going to learn and adapt? I don’t see any major American chain retailer using the web to effectively build customer relationships. Of course you can click, buy, and get your goods. But I don’t see anyone embracing the consumer online as well as they could be. I hope that this case can be a wakeup call to Kohl’s and others in the industry.

Listen to your customers – not only the ones who take the time to fill out the web survey that gets printed with their receipt.

In the interest of full disclosure – I work for Kohl’s. I work at the store level, far from any place that would give me the authority to comment on how or why Kohl’s is publically handling the situation like this. I do not write this post as an employee of Kohl’s, I write it as a consumer who is not entirely happy with the disconnect between retailers and their consumers online.