I found the epitome of high-end customer service in the high-fashion, high-technology retail shops of Katherine Barchetti.

Her database allows her to know a lot about her 30,000 customers—and to measure her employees’ effectiveness six different ways every day. The measurement scheme is not the latest in management by intimidation, but rather part of a determined effort to turn each employee into a fully informed retailer—capable of anticipating each customer’s very personal needs. She is redefining customer service via high levels of customer knowledge and involvement.

Make People Want to Buy

If today is like most others, Katherine Barchetti is eating, breathing, and sleeping numbers. Though her store revenues per square foot are more than three times that of the average retailer, Barchetti isn’t worrying about bottom-line results. She’s more interested in knowing her customers’ spending habits, suit sizes, and mailing addresses. “I think numbers run the world,” she says.

But Barchetti’s tallying and tracking is really about service, attention to detail, and building relationships with customers. It’s about knowing that Mr. Smith enjoys an evening at the symphony and Ms. Jones can shop only during her lunch hour. “People buy for their lifestyle.”

Barchetti has personalized shopping for all her customers. “I want to make people want to buy from me. Every decision is based on this.”

She maintains meticulous records on customers’ sizes, preferences, and past purchases. She arranges private fittings. She calls customers to tout a new clothing line. The goal is to “make a customer, not a sale,” says Barchetti.

Long-time customer John Elash says that a Barchetti sales associate once offered to bring clothes to his office because he was short on time.

Barchetti has been called “the best retailer in more than 800 cities” by a leading retail analyst and “amazing” by several staff members. Her non-commissioned sales associates work in teams. One greets the customer while another pulls up his or her record in the database. A third wanders over with a pair of shoes and a belt.

Crescent-shaped work tables large enough to hold a couple of suits with coordinating mix-and-match items are used to assemble the wardrobe. Merchandise is stored in large cabinets within an arm’s reach. Sales associates don’t have to leave the customer’s side, which helps build a bond.

Store managers know everything in their regular clients’ wardrobes. Family members often call them for gift suggestions.

Service is not new to Barchetti. Her career started at the age of eight, selling vegetables door-to-door and making clothes for her seven younger brothers. She organized fashion shows at age 17 and opened her first clothing store with $1,000 at age 21. She still leads training sessions on product knowledge, buying, what’s happening in the market, last week’s numbers, and what competitors are doing. At the meetings, employees report on merchandise they are responsible for. They manage every aspect of the product: buying, maintaining inventory, coordinating, marketing, selling. If one class of merchandise is ahead on sales for the month, employees will discuss ways to increase sales in another category. “I don’t hire people who need to be managed,” she says. “I hire people who can manage themselves and can manage a project for us.”

Employees also work on projects, such as coordinating the store’s annual fashion show, displaying the store’s $1.5 million worth of merchandise, or managing inventory. Involving employees allows Barchetti “to clone my grasp of the industry. I now have 22 people selling with my high taste level and my level of knowledge.”

Barchetti holds her employees to her standards. “People have to measure up,” she says. Sales associates’ performance is tracked daily and printouts are available so they always know how they are doing.

Associates are graded in sales goals, dollars per sale, items sold per transaction, percentage of transactions involving multiple sales, building new client relationships, making follow-up calls within six weeks, and asking for the name, address and phone number of the customer.

“The most important things are customer complaints,” says Barchetti, “but some people are chronic complainers.”

Barchetti won’t deal with customers who abuse her employees, won’t buy from vendors who are dishonest, and won’t tolerate employees who “don’t get it.” She accepts no excuses. “Most retailers will talk about why they didn’t make their numbers. I say stop rationalizing and accept responsibility.”

Plan to Achieve Quality Service

1. Know your customer. Katherine Barchetti knows everything about customers. It’s her obsession and her basis for remarkable performance.

2. Engage your customer. Knowing about your customer is useless if you don’t put the information to use.

3. Treat the customer as an individual. Sales associates at K. Barchetti know their customers’ tastes.

4. Let your customer lead you. It’s a tough lesson, unpalatable to many, but pays off big-time for K. Barchetti.

5. To build high customer involvement, build high “people” involvement. Katherine Barchetti is turning each of her employees into a retailer.

6. Turn expectations on their ear. She continues to reinvent retailing.

7. Have nerve! If you know things have to get better, dare to bet your reputation on a change of culture.

8. Make no excuses. If K. Barchetti can do it (and she is doing it), then you and I have no excuse. SME

Tom Peters is president of the Tom Peters Group and author of In Pursuit of Wow. This article is adapted from On Achieving Excellence, © TPG Communications.

ACTION: Try doing two things done by K. Barchetti.