Innovator of the Year - Customer Service

Pauline and Steve Smith
Sunnyside Nursery 

OK. You’ve probably figured out by now that Steve Smith and the Missus aren’t your garden variety nursery owners. Quiz any 50 of Steve and Pauline’s favorite customers, and odds are better than good that the word “fun” will work its way into the assessment.

There might be an “offbeat” and a “uniquely dedicated” thrown in for good measure. And “customer-oriented” will certainly come up. And up. And up some more. In fact, it’s that consensus description of the folks who run Sunnyside Nursery that has earned the Marysville, Wash., garden center a place among Garden Center magazine’s 2009 Innovator Award winners – the customer service they provide is second to none.  

Oh, and did we mention that Steve likes to have a good time?

“My personal philosophy is simple: Don’t take yourself too seriously,” he said. “Try and have some fun in life. Make your work feel like play. Treat people with respect. That doesn’t mean you can’t [rag] them and abuse them; just make sure they see you wink when you do. Lighten up. Relax. On my tombstone it will read: ‘It will be fine.’”

In fact, it has been fine literally from the time he was about to need that tombstone – and then didn’t. “I had a near-death experience a long time ago – no, I was dead and came back to life – and I realized that in the grand scheme of things, nothing much is really important. Follow the Golden Rule and expect to get screwed now and then. Life goes on.”

A rich history. For Steve and Pauline, a primary focus in that life is a garden center that dates to 1948, serving all the while a wide range of gardening needs, from soils, fertilizers, pesticides, tools, garden  décor, pottery, arbors and trellises, to a remarkable selection of annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees. Sunnyside’s friendly and knowledgeable staff has a simple mantra that it shares with its customers: “Come Garden with Us!”

To entice the good folks of the Great Northwest to do just that, Smith has instituted a number of customer service staples, starting with The Sunnyside Nursery Customer Appreciation Program. Like Smith, the program is straightforward and easy: “Be our customer, and we appreciate it!”
 
The program works like this: Any time someone purchases something from Sunnyside Nursery at regular price, Smith and staff will mark that amount on his/her Customer Appreciation Card. When the customer fills up the card, he/she can use it for $10 off the next purchase. The card can be used any time on anything.
“Filled it up 10 years ago? No problem!,” Smith said. “There is no expiration date. Want to use it during the busiest time of the gardening season? No problem! You can use it any time of the year. Want to buy a shrub that you’ve had your eye on, but darned it if it isn’t on sale when you get around to picking it up? No problem! You can use the card toward sales items, too.”

 A significant facet of the program is “Customer Appreciation Day!” Every October, the garden center dedicates an entire afternoon to its customers. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on this day, the staff has the grill going for free hot dogs, along with chips, drinks, and even cake. “We hand out raffle tickets to give away tons of gardening supplies (from tools, to pots, to compost and fertilizer, to plants, and even planted containers) and a gift certificate to the nursery,” Smith said. “This day is kid-friendly, too, with face painting and various activities set up for our customers’ children to enjoy. We realize the ultimate reason for our success is our customers. We enjoy showing them our appreciation. Our ‘Customer Appreciation Program’ is one way of doing this.”

The train station. Another is Smith’s emphasis on making the Sunnyside staff as knowledgeable and as accessible as he is. He encourages and underwrites horticultural training and supports the state nursery Certified Professional Horticulturalist program. “We give them the tools, if they are truly interested, to learn more,” Smith said.

Ultimately, the staff isn’t the lone beneficiary in the investment. The customer, happy with a visit to Sunnyside, tells friends, thus spawning, as Smith put it, “the best and cheapest form of advertising.” 

Smith surely figures into the buzz, but he said it’s his coworkers who deserve the credit. “If you asked our customers what is our best customer service trait, they would probably say they mostly appreciate the clean sani-cans, tidy grounds, clearly organized and signed plant material and our overall efforts to educate them,” he said. “From my perspective, though,  I think the most valuable customer service we provide is to help them be successful by explaining how to plant properly in our mostly glacial till soils – and I use the term ‘soil’ very loosely.”

To that end, his staff members have all been instructed to remove plants from their containers and actually show customers real live roots. “You know, of course, that most customers are root-phobic,” he said. “So we show them how to properly rip and tear and loosen them up so the damn plants will actually survive once they leave our tender loving care. And as they leave the parking lot I usually holler out to them, ‘Don’t forget, the green side goes up!’”
 
Smith the jokester is actually quite earnest about how important the staff is to the store’s ability to connect with customers. “We just continually reiterate the importance of making sure the customer is being taken care of,” he said. “We have a few staff meetings in the spring to get everyone on the same page but then sort of fall down on the job. I tell my employees not to be anal about rules and regulations. The experience must be positive. Treat the customer like a long-lost friend. Make them part of the family. Smile at them, Ask them how their garden survived the winter. Act like you care about them. You are building a relationship.”

Finding the right mix. Coupling his personality with their work ethic has help Sunnyside make an indelible mark in the market. “We all sell the same stuff, but the single thing that is unique to each garden center is the staff,” he said. “Nobody else has the Whistling Gardener or Kerry [Hollinger] my retail manager or Mary [Stole] my greenhouse manager or Chris [Hinricksen] my tree and shrub expert ... I think you get the idea. You have to promote what is unique to you, and for all of us it is our staff.  Put their faces in your ads and on posters. Pretty soon, customers equate your business with the people that make it what it is.”

The Whistling Gardener would be Smith, who shares the character with customers on the company Web site, in quarterly newsletters, and in a weekly column that he writes for several local newspapers. “I had a landscaping and maintenance business in California before moving to Washington,” he recalled. “We often had to enter backyards to do maintenance, so as a warning just in case the homeowner was out there sun bathing I got into the habit of whistling to let them know we were coming in. Nowadays, I’m mostly whistling when the sun is shining or when the cash register is ca-chinging.”

Smiling, on the other hand, is reserved for – well, for practically every moment of every day. Take, for example, the first day of April this year, when he devoted his newspaper column to the Ragu Tomato, a genetic miracle that somehow mixes the spices, sauce and noodles with the fruit to produce a plant that is ready to eat as an entrée, straight from the vine. Next up for 2010, he wrote, is the Ragu Plus tomato: “It will be the one with a beef gene spliced in so you can have some meat balls with your sauce and noodles. In other words, it will be full of bull, which is exactly what this entire article is full of, too. Happy April Fools’ Day.”