theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Banks Using Podcasts to Connect: First Direct stays on brand with clear communication

First Direct, a UK direct banking organization that is part of the HSBC group, announced that they would be charging customers with dormant accounts a 10 GBP monthly fee. Bravely, they have a podcast  that contains an interview with Chris Pilling, the CEO, explaining what is going on:

This podcast contains key information about the new current account proposition.
  Our Chief Exec, Chris Pilling, talks in detail about exactly what is happening and how it will affect our customers.

It's short, and worth listening to. He comes across as calm and clear, and provides a reasonable explanation of what is going on.  Whether or not you agree with what he's saying, this is such a great approach, to speak directly to your customers about what is going on. Way to go!

When I looked around their home page, you can see that the podcast is totally on brand for these guys: "jargon free service."

A couple of other things that caught my attention:

• imagery that is fun and friendly
• Pet insurance -- pets are big, and getting bigger. Plus they're cute and friendly for a bank to show on its home page
• "Most recommended" -- a much more compelling statement than the usual, "we're great." And it reinforces the customer focus

Customer Experience Coach Tips:

• Translate the core values of the brand into everything you do, including how you handle announcements of service changes and bad news in particular

Research on Employee Burnout and Turnover: Don't diss the staff

"It is often not the job that burns you out, but the organization."

Difficult jobs become more difficult when people don't feel respected by managers and peers, according to new research published by Lakshmi Ramarajan at Wharton. This disrespect directly leads to burnout.

Past research has focused on employees' ability to manage their own stress level to avoid burn-out. ['It's your fault, you're just being negative'] Other research has pointed to the job itself as the culprit. ['Some jobs are just more demanding than others, there's only so much we can do about that']

But respect is pervasive and observed by everyone in an organization, according to Ramarajan:

"respect can be a powerful signal to individuals regarding their standing not only as employees but as people.... As information comes from a variety of sources, one's perceptions of respect and disrespect are not only based on how one views one's own treatment, but also by how others are treated. For example, when team members see someone else on the team being treated unfairly, they alter their own perceptions of the fairness of the team. Likewise, the extent to which others, not just the self, are treated ... can influence an individual's own perceptions of respect."

Read the Knowledge at Wharton article here. Download the whole research paper here.

Trendwatching: Managing the Infoglut and the Info-guilt

Drowning in the Infoglut

Infoglut arrived as a new and powerful word for me in this morning's e-mail box. And doesn't this word just capture the problem nicely?  We all know the problem... and it's getting worse all the time.
There's just too much information, too many cool sites to visit, too much e-mail to read, too much learning to absorb. None of us can keep up.

Suffering the Infoguilt

Personally, I have info-guilt: a deep concern that I'm not adequately keeping up.

Wonderful magazine articles not yet read are stacked around my office. [Including the thing you sent me from the NY Times, Herb, it's here somewhere, and probably I will love it when I get to it]

Blog items not yet read are accumulating like dust-bunnies in my Bloglines account.  I stopped by Flooring the Consumer this morning, because of a Google alert, which led me to a couple of blogtipping posts at Converstations and Business Blogwire, and thereby found a whole bunch of cool and interesting blogs that I didn't know about.  ARRRGH!!! 

Potential interesting speaking events are dutifully noted in the calendar. If they are free webinars, notwithstanding my interest level, or their relevance, I might not manage to attend, and the guilt-o-meter surges.

If you're like me, and insight is what you sell for a living, keeping up is crucial. And in fact, let's admit it, we're being honest here, it's a joyous activity for many of us, if only one had enough time.

Of course this is just in my professional life. In my personal life, I can't keep up either. Don't even get me started about the over-choice problem...  How about you?  Are you stroking confidently through those waves of information, or just staying afloat and trying to keep your head up?

Helping people filter the infoglutter

If you are a marketer, you will need to rise above this noise. You need to help people through the info-glut, not add to it. If you have a service that helps people stay on top of information or manage it more effectively, your future is bright.

And watch how much choice you throw at people. It's a short trip from 'having options' to 'drowning in options'. Even better, give them only the best choices, and make it easy to be smart.

The future is bright for brands, advisors and expert help

This infoglut, infoglutter problem is just about the most important trend I know of right now. It's so pervasive, we can hardly see it for looking at it.

In the early days of new information technologies, it looked like brands might lose out when consumers could go find anything on the net. Well, brands are advisors to a large degree. We expect our favorite brands to do quite a bit of filtering for us, and only offer up choices that fit the core values of the brand. And what could be more important now, when faced with overwhelming options? 

In the early days of online stock trading, many suggested that financial advisors would soon disappear. Guess what... that's another place where overwhelming choice and abundant information mean that the future looks bright for those that actually provide filtering and advice.

New parents now are apparently obsessed with making the perfect parenting decisions, utilizing all the complex information available to them. They've got no excuse right? It's not like the information wasn't out there. It's the perfect environment for a parenting coach.

References

The press release that started this post: The press release from Panasonic that started this post is here. Panasonic is offering help to anyone who needs it in making decisions about plasma TVs. Seems like a good idea.  Whether it works or not, I do like the thinking behind this, of providing expert help. They're cutting this off on Dec. 31, which is too bad. And I guess you have to figure out that it's a plasma before you call, and not some other kind of flat screen... (just let me do a little research on that first, so I know the right question to ask).

A previous post on this topic: Choice and the Role of Advice: how advisers change the customer experience

An excellent book on the topic of choice: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz.  Excellent explanations of some of the science about choice and decision-making and easy reading. Guaranteed to get you highlighting key passages.

How to ask questions

In the previous post, I was attempting to draw an analogy between perceptual illusions and puzzles and why we need to look carefully if we want to understand what is really going on. There are many roadblocks to the truth, however. Let me give you an example:

I belong to a business club that has speakers at breakfast and dinner, workshops, and that sort of thing.
They are facing declining membership numbers, and are trying to understand what is going on, using member surveys, among other things.

Some long-time volunteers on the executive are of the view that some people join just to be able to list membership in this prestigious organization on their resume. And indeed, there is a group of members  -- about 20% -- that renew annually, but never attend events.  So the instincts of the leadership are probably right -- some members obtain value from membership independent of actually attending the educational events.

The organization wanted to test this notion in their membership survey. This is the question they used, in a list of reasons for joining: 

"I joined XYZ ... (pick two from a list)... to be recognized as someone that belongs to a reputable organization."

Only 3% of the respondents to the survey selected this as a reason for joining. That shouldn't really surprise you, because most of us don't want to admit to shallow motives, even to ourselves, even in an anonymous survey.

Asking questions sideways

If we really want to find the answer to this question, we are going to have to come at it sideways somehow.  Most commercial survey research uses multivariate techniques to tease out these kinds of findings. Like connecting the strength of your agreement with attitudinal statements (e.g."it is important to belong to prestigious business organizations") with your stated likelihood of renewing your membership.

In qualitative research, we cook up exercises of various sorts, instead of just asking the literal question directly. [It's also because most of us really like to play with colored markers and Post-it notes, although that's just a corollary benefit.] Sometimes, we may just ask what you think others do, not what you yourself do.

Cool method called randomized response technique

In social policy research, sometimes the question is so sensitive, there is a concern that respondents will lie to avoid sharing a socially unacceptable response, even with the interviewer. Topics like domestic abuse, for example, are unlikely to receive the unvarnished truth from respondents. A clever method called "Randomized Response Techique" was devised to get around this problem.

Here's how it works. I want to ask you to answer a question about your belief in capital punishment. So I have a card with two questions on it, which I hand you. I also hand you a box that has one white and one black marble in it. I invite you to pick a marble from the box, but not to show it to me. Then I ask you to answer the question on the card, but not to tell me which question you answered:

A (white marble).  Flip a coin. Do you support capital punishment?  Say yes if you agree, and no if you disagree.

B (black marble).  Flip a coin. Did you get heads?  Say yes if you agree, and no if you disagree.

Even the interviewer does not know which question you answered. They just write down whether your response was yes or no. Using statistics we extract the answers to the innocuous question, and are left with the answers to the real question. Way cool, huh?

There's always bias

Most of the time, you don't need something quite this tricky. But you do need to consider that people will bias their responses toward things that are socially more desirable. They will state a higher income range than they have, they will say they watch less TV than they do, they will say they read more books to their kids, they will say they eat healthier food, drink less wine, exercise more often ... you name it.

So the more you can observe directly, the better off you are. And your questions, when you ask them, need to be clever.

Marketing Segmentation: shameless plug alert

Warning: shameless plug coming: I'm telling you about an upcoming speaking engagement. If you hate this sort of thing, skip this post. 

I'll be talking at an upcoming conference on market segmentation to be held in Toronto on Dec 14 & 15. Sue Ince, one of my colleagues, is also on the agenda, talking about multi-dimensional methods and similar quantitative methods. She's forgotten more about this stuff than most people ever learn. So it should be a useful event. Full details here.

And if you do attend, and you're a reader, please introduce yourself! 

Illusions, Paradoxes and Human Behavior

There's a puzzle/paradox making the rounds right now that shows 12 people turning into 13 people merely by moving some parts around.  It's a great puzzle, a classic actually, that was first created with images on blocks of wood that you can rearrange.  The puzzle offends our sense of conservation: how can 12 people in the first image become 13 people in the second?  It works by leveraging our tendency to perceive things in certain ways.

With the little people, we want to count people, not heads or lines. We are looking for the whole, and once we have found it, cannot see beyond that label. But these are not people, they are lines, blobs and shapes.

Solving the puzzle

To illustrate how to unwind this paradox, I recreated it with ovals. (Mine isn't quite as neat, sorry about that.)
Each of the ovals is divided into 12 parts in the first image. In the second, only one oval has twelve parts, and some only have 10 parts.

Another way of looking at this is, in the first image, there are 144 bits of oval, arranged in 12 groups of 12. In the second image, there are 144 bits of oval, arranged in 13 groupings. 

Getting behind the paradox to see what's going on

We have natural tendencies to see things in certain ways. Our brains are hardwired for this, and we have survived a long time as a species because of this.  And often our instincts are correct.  But not always.

When we really want to understand what is going on, which is what research is all about, we have to engineer opportunities to deconstruct things. We need to force ourselves to suspend quick judgment, and keep looking until all the pieces fit. Paradoxes are actually useful because they present a crack in the facade, and invite deeper investigation.

Having a deep understanding of how human beings and our societies work is immensely helpful in this work. There are hidden rules at work in our cultures just as surely as there are in perception.

Addendum Nov 20: thanks to vigilant editor BGW who suggested changes to make this post clearer.

Service Recovery: apologies and liability

"I'm really sorry this happened"

When things go wrong, our sense of justice cries out for an apology. For reasons of liability, the more wrong something is, the less likely you are to actually get one. This may be changing, at least in some places.

Saskatchewan is the latest jurisdiction to introduce changes to their Evidence Act explicitly to address and remove the liability attached to an apology.

British Columbia, California, and Australia already had something like this in place. We should have this everywhere, so nobody hides behind the fear of unwittingly creating a bigger problem just by saying "I'm sorry".  Very often, this is all people really want -- a sincere apology. Without it, disputes can drag on and leave people feeling dissatisfied and deeply hurt.

People are less likely to sue their doctor over malpractice if they get a sincere personal apology. So it's not just the right thing to do, you can save money, too.

Let's get this going everywhere, and bring a little more humanity back into customer relationships.

References:

'Sorry' not enough for legal liability, Saskatchewan says, Globe & Mail, Nov 17, 2006 (free for 7 days after publication)

Apology a tool to avoid malpractice suits, Boston Globe, Nov. 12, 2004

The Sorry Works! Coalition, an organization promoting the use of appropriate apologies as a way to reduce medical malpractice suits, and increase disclosure in doctor-patient relationships. White papers, research summaries, and other resources

PS - we're not talking here about the popular fake apology, the public relations apology, or anything other than the real deal.   

Let's stop pretending committees are teams

Committees aren't teams. Teams win and lose together. Committees can function well or badly, but most committees in organizational life are actually competing to some extent, and co-operating to some extent. Rarely do they win and lose together, regardless of how many off-site team building sessions you engage in. [and we've all been there, right?]

Teamwork is one of those words that has assumed almost sacred proportions, as an end, not a means to an end. If someone disagrees, you can quickly cut them off at the knees by accusing them of lacking teamwork. Forcing consensus where none exists is not teamwork, but it gets trotted out that way often enough.

Alan Weiss brought this nicely into focus for me in this article: A Team Isn't Necessarily a Good Thing.

True teams, he says, have these characteristics:

• Self-directed in terms of setting goals and allocating reward within the team
• Rewarded collectively as a team
• Sharing of resources and information without reservation or condition, including budget
• Selects its own leadership and governance, including meeting style, format, frequency, etc.
• Can “sunset” itself and, in most cases, should do so

He suggests asking these questions before undertaking efforts to improve teamwork:

1. Is the organization’s best interests and strategic direction best served by teams or committees in the area of concern?
2. If teams are required, is the client prepared to correctly empower them, treat them, and communicate with them?
3. If teams are required, what is the correct duration and competition, especially in light of the criteria to be met?
4. If committees are the better alternative, does the client understand the differences and the appropriate dynamics?

Some nice clear thinking. Let's not force all committees to be teams -- they're not teams. They need to work well together and be effective.

Don't plant the seeds of doubt

"Good to excellent service must be delivered again and again. As soon as a customer has a bad customer service experience, the seeds of doubt are planted. The probability of the next sale decreases, erasing gains made from previous positive experiences."
        - Carlos Mora

This is so, so true. You are only as good as the last experience. You may have been heroes for years, but any deviation is seen as a new and negative trend, not an aberration.

And it might not even have been your organization that let someone down. It might have been another company in your category, but the customer thinks you are all the same.

The fundamental difference between a service experience and a product experience is the tremendous difficulty of delivering consistency. Don't let anybody tell you it's easy -- it's not. But you have to keep at it. The gardens of customer experience take a long time to cultivate, but they are always fragile.

Here's article link: "Customer Service as Marketing through Statistical Modeling" by Carlos Mora, DM Direct Nov 14, 2006.  Thanks to Emma Warrilow.

Responsive service: how fast, how personalized?

Like it or not, our customers compare us on many dimensions across categories, not within categories. I think this is particularly true with things like contact centres where you speak to an agent, and online "contact us" kinds of help.

The new standard for B2B: act on feedback immediately

I'm experiencing some exceptionally responsive service right now from a technology company, and it got me thinking. FocusForums has kindly loaned me the use of their platform to use in a student project I'm handling right now, which will culminate in an afternoon seminar for some post-grad research students. They asked if I would take some notes on my experience with their application and share any feedback that they could use to improve navigation or functionality. So I've been capturing stream-of-consciousness notes and e-mailing them every day.

Note that this is not a new business -- they've been steadily improving this application for four or five years or more.

The incredible thing is that they started responding to my feedback immediately. They didn't say, "thanks, we'll put that into the hopper for the next development cycle". They said, in effect, "let's get somebody on this", and they have already made several improvements to navigation. WOW.

Let me just emphasize one more thing here. I'm not their customer yet. I think they would like me to be a customer, but right now, I'm just a prospect.

The new standard for B2C: respond like you mean it, and be quick

Here's a few examples of excellence in the B2C world.

The Ask-Us button:

I recently sent an e-mail question to the "ask us" address at a not-for-profit centre of excellence associated with a university. I thought I might never hear back, or might get a pre-loaded response. Nope. The next day, I had a personal, detailed response with links to additional helpful resources.

The Help ticket:

Typepad, the folks that provide this platform, invariably respond to help tickets the same day. A personalized response. With a name. Recently, I sent them a request for a feature. They asked for clarification. I provided it. And they said, "I will certainly pass this feedback along, it's a great idea." This all happened in the space of a single day.

The help forum:

Not all web 2.0 tech companies can pull this off, apparently. I use Feedburner statistics. I use the paid version, theoretically "premium".  The statistics jump around a lot, sometimes as much as 30% in a day. I have posted queries on their user forums. I finally sent them an e-mail one day. Their form letter e-mail told me to go look at the forum topic. Not personalized. And not very helpful. Most of it in geek-speak. You're a blogger, therefore you must be a geek, right? If not, you probably shouldn't play with these toys, you might hurt somebody.

Palm also has a help forum, filled with issues from users with problems. Here's one from October 31, with no answer yet. At least Feedburner monitors their forum and posts responses. Palm doesn't seem to see a need to do this.

The whole existence of a huge forum with problems and titles like "Known Workarounds" or "phpBB 2 Issues" just tells you what you need to know, doesn't it? What kind of a product or service generates tens of thousands of user problems, and then doesn't fix them?

More importantly, where is your organization on this spectrum?

Who's Your Chief Brand Officer? or Chief Culture Officer?

I was reading Ted Matthews' newsletter today. In it he discusses why CEOs need to be the chief brand officer for the company, embodying in their actions the promises that the brand fulfills.

Ted points to Clive Beddoe, CEO of WestJet, the Canadian version of Southwest, and in fact modelled on them. Clive's staff were caught with their hands in the cookie jar of competitor Air Canada's computers, checking their secret pricing and flight load data. More than a few times. It's not that they got caught that is the problem -- its that Clive didn't come clean when he found out about it.

Regrettably, he was one of the best, and I've heard this from WestJet flight attendants, in between their constant smiling, singing, joke telling and general good hosting. A client of mine once saw Clive saying hi to passengers and busing the plane as he walked down the aisle to the bathroom.

I have thought for some time now that the CEO's longest term work is to create a culture and organization that can fulfill the long term goals of the company. And brand is really part of that, isn't it? 

There are lots of stories of CEOs who left their organizations with their reputation in tatters. While thousands of people in these companies strive to make things happen every day for customers, for much less remuneration than accords a C-suite executive. It must be devastating for them when these things happen. Another good reason to take the CBO, CCO role seriously.

Trend Watching

Personalization
I've been monitoring the term personalization with various alerts for a while now.  The traffic on this term is steadily rising.  A few months ago, days would go by with no alert. As of this week, every day I get an alert, and every day there is an increasing number of items on the list.
I don't know if any personalization is actually happening out there, but everyone is talking about it.

Instant Messaging
WebEx, the meeting host people, are advertising secure instant messaging on the AOL interface as a business application. Get ready to lose the rest of your free time.
I also think this means that the research opportunities using instant messaging are going to keep getting better, now that a secure application is available.

I tried to register on the WebEx site this morning to download their free whitepaper and tell you all aboutt this.  The registration page hung on me so many times I gave up. Tried their home page, thinking I could find some basic info there.  Guess it was important enough to buy full page ads in major business magazines, but not important enough to be findable on the home page.

Over at WebEx, someone is probably sayind, "gawd, I hope nobody blogs about this mess-up". 

Market Segmentation: Looking for stories and examples

I'm putting the finishing touches on a presentation I'm giving soon on market segmentation. The specific topic relates to successful implementation.  [Hardly a one hour topic, more like a book, but that's another story]. 

So who are the heroes of successful marketing segmentation these days? What are the stories we should be celebrating or wringing our hands about?

If you have thoughts on this topic, war stories to share, or ideas about who has done this well, please comment, send me an e-mail, fly a trial balloon etc. Like Yankelovich's February 2006 article in Harvard Business Review (a masterpiece on this topic, but you will need to buy it if you don't subscribe), I want to focus on taking action in the business to respond to the segmentation. 

New Survey Results on Blogging and Communication

Nora Barnes, Professor of Marketing at U.Mass. Dartmouth and Eric Mattson have just released the results of their second study of 80 business bloggers:

Thinking Like A Blogger: Is Blogging An Attitude That Can Be Taught?

I was happy to participate in the study, the focus of which was the communication style of bloggers, and what implications it has for corporate bloggers, and corporate communications in general.

A few of their key conclusions that resonated with me:

"An overwhelming majority of the bloggers believe the attitude and behavior associated with having an effective blog can be taught. The challenge, they say, is teaching a business to speak in an “authentic voice” regardless of what communications tools it chooses to employ. These bloggers believe that if businesses practice open and honest communications consistently in all their activities, they will be successful, regardless of whether they blog or not."
...

"To the final and important question of whether your business needs a blog, our respondents primarily argue that blogs are not a silver bullet but instead are merely one of the best current communications tools for humanizing a business. They advocate for honesty, transparency, authenticity and two-way communication."

If you want to read the whole study, get the charts, etc. you will need to buy the Journal of the Society for New Communications Research here. The Society's website is here.
 

If you don't want to buy the journal, here's the big takeaway in my view:

The value to your customers of open, transparent and authentic voice, real listening and acknowledgement, has never been higher. The popularity of blogs and other emerging social media is testament to this. Ignore this trend at your peril.

Wrapping up the Bathroom Blogfest

"Utilitarian afterthoughts given little actual real thought. Did you say the bathrooms in your discussion were secure? Where in the airport do I "securely" put my luggage (expensive PC in tote) while squeezing my XL frame into the M-sized cubicle? Strangely, in college I remember the bathrooms having shelves and coat hooks ... was I hallucinating?

 

We own a coffee shop. First thing tonight ... we address all your suggestions."

 

Really, this is an exercise in thinking through the customer experience at even this most humble of levels"

We started this one week Bathroom Blogfest as a fun little group project. But as reader Jack captured in the note he sent me, it is a great "exercise in thinking through the customer experience." Which was really the point, and I'm delighted it worked.

This topic really resonated with people. When I told people, the initial reaction was typically a "that's weird" response, immediately followed by personal observations, recollections, frustrations and wishes.

My hair guru, Jonathan Torch, told me how wonderful the Disney bathrooms were for a young family.  How these bathrooms were legendary among his friends with young families. The memory was so powerful, I asked how long ago this was...  well, his teens were in strollers then, so more than a decade. Turns out lots of people are fans (see resources below).

What we learned

I completely underestimated the power of this issue. Marketers and experience engineers need to pay attention to this issue, because expectations are rising. People care, they remember, they are judging and evaluating all elements.

At even the simplest level of traffic, you have to think that all those people who stopped in to use the Starbucks facilities probably bought something too, just as Linda Tischler reported doing. 

With changing demographics, the developed world expects facilities to accommodate them. No one wants to stay home because your bathroom can't accomodate their scooter.  And in the developing world, this issue is just starting to emerge. It's going to be big there, just like it was here, when we said "no" to dingy gas station bathrooms and started stopping at McDonald's instead.

How to spend a week without really trying

Without the organizational skills of consultant and author Stephanie Weaver,  who pretty much acted as project manager, none of this would have happened. [Thanks Stephanie!].

It was fun, and we may just have to do it again in a year. [Steph, you should be fully recovered by then, right?]. And thanks also to Cynthia Jones who helped with press releases.

Quite apart from the puns and double-entendres, there was some great content too...

This sort of thing just doesn't work as a solo event ... thanks to all the official and unofficial contributors:

Linda Tischler at Fast Company Now networked in the bathroom line-up at Pop-Tech, blessed Starbucks for providing the needed facilities in the needed places and  showed us a bus bathroom that puts the airplanes to shame. We felt proud to be in such esteemed company.

Stephanie Weaver at Experienceology gave us an education in what works and what doesn't, with an amazing collection of pictures from around the world. Her latest post makes it clear that you can either extend your brand or detract from it, by how much attention you pay to the water closet. The most memorable ones, for me, were the kid-friendly sink and the urinals shaped like flowers.

Christine Whittemore at Flooring the Customer definitely was our energizer bunny this week, posting detailed and daily with lots of links to cool stuff. And of course, CB was the only one of us who paid any attention to floors, her particular area of expertise. If in doubt that your retail customers notice, check out CB's posts. They notice, they talk, they care.

Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer found good-looking diaper changing tables with diaper-genies to dispose of the smelly aftermath while shopping on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Sara Cantor at the Curious Shopper examined the whole handwashing and don't-touch-this-it's-got-germs thing. After finding out how many people don't wash their hands, I'm definitely taking the Purell with me in future.

Maria Palma at Customers Are Always toured us from Starbucks to Tijuana and back. She wants a place to put her purse, and I think we all agree on that one.

Sandra Renshaw at Purple Wren joined late, but made up for it with the great signage she photographed, and the world's fastest hand-dryer.

Reshma Anand provided eyes and ears into a very different customer experience, and one that is rapidly evolving, in Bangalore. And lobbied for all of us for better, cleaner airplane bathrooms. We all thank you for that, Reshma!

Dee McCrory at the Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur, David Polinchok at Experience Manifesto, Bill Kinnon at Achievable Ends, Kent Blumberg at Leadership, Strategy & Performance all picked up on the theme and added their own thoughts. [Apologies if I missed someone here]

Resources:
I encourage you to check out the bathroom design page at the American Restroom Association, here. It's a volunteer organization, and they are interested in help, feedback and ideas.

Cassworld: Disney bathrooms are documented in more than a hundred photographs on this site. Note the presence of vending machines in many of them, which contain things like diapers and wipes. Note the presence of towel dispensers right above the sinks. MousePlanet has ratings for each Disney bathroom.

Temporary Bathrooms: The Blogfest Continues

On a business trip to Jamaica, I was delighted to be a guest at a customer & employee appreciation event held at Jamaica Broilers. This company has among the most beautiful and innovative head offices I have ever seen and they brought the same creativity to their giant picnic. Including the temporary bathroom facilities.

They took the basic johnny-on-the-spot plastic port-a-potty, and created separate women's and men's areas. Each had a bank of stalls, wrapped in the Madras bandana red plaid cloth that is part of the national costume.

Quite apart from being totally clean, they actually looked welcoming.

Right beside these was a tent with portable sinks set up, and every amenity you would expect from a four-star hotel: cologne, places to sit, a full-length mirror, hand-lotion, bandages, sewing kits, flowers and candles. The ladies were all buzzing about the wonderful loo arrangements.

I only wish I'd had the sense to take a picture.

Igloos takes the portable toilet to a new level

Igloos has built a business from upgrading these portable toilet facilities. If you want your outdoor guests to feel special, don't make them go in a stinky port-a-potty: give them something nice:

Providing mobile toilets is a vital aspect of any event; providing luxury portable toilets is becoming increasingly more important as expectations of events continue to raise.  This is thanks to the industry as a whole. IGLOOS provide beautiful loos for beautiful events - you have the event and we have the loos!

Thanks to Springwise for the tip.

Place & Process in the Ladies Room: Bathroom Blogfest Continues

Let's look at the typical public bathroom from a customer experience standpoint. Our focus is place and process, two dimensions that are inseparable here, because the design of the bathroom largely determines the process. There are a number of design issues in the bathroom, as we'll see in a moment.

Location: where IS the bathroom?

Can you find it? Why do we always have to ask where the heck the bathroom is?  Is it possible developers don't ever have to go? Or did they all go before they left home, just like mom said to do? Or maybe they never had a kid in their hand that was saying, "Daddy, I have to go now!"

Store employees report that they are frequently asked where the bathroom is, because mall signage is ambiguous. Nancy Lueck of Bloomingdale's in Stanford Shopping Center, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, says, "If you are standing in the store as an employee, the first question you always get asked is where are the rest rooms."

One of my favorite worst examples of poor location and signage is the ladiesroom in Scotia Plaza's food court.

Scotia Plaza is a triple A office tower with an underground shopping complex in the high rent financial district. They may have the most expensive square footage in the city. As you can see from the food court picture, it has luxe finishes everywhere, and there's even a concierge for tenants.

But if you can find the signage for the bathrooms, you will then have to walk through two fire doors, and wind your way through the bowels of the building to find the public washrooms.You leave the public space and enter the industrial corridor. Perhaps this was intentional, but I avoid their food court for this reason.

In general, the bathroom is removed from the official public space. In another food court across the street at Commerce Court, you also go into the service corridor to use the bathroom. Most malls are set up this way as well. Makes no sense to me at all.

Let's go inside

Here's a typical layout for a public ladies room. Three stalls, parallel to three sinks, each with a mirror. One of the stalls is wider for handicapped access.

Soap dispensers are sometimes provided for each sink, but sometimes, inexplicably, there is one for a whole group of sinks, and you need to walk to it.

As Heather S. recently pointed out to me, most soap dispensers cannot be used by someone without two hands free. You need one hand to press the dispenser, and the other to catch the soap if you don't want to scrape it out of the sink:

"I’ve seen handicapped people struggle with them and helped them out.  And, yes, it’s been me with a briefcase and a purse and a coat…but, at least I have the option to put on my coat, or put down my purse/briefcase."

Of course, there is no official place to put down your coat or briefcase once you are outside the stall.  You have to hold them, or put them down between two sinks, or on a floor that is likely wet. But there's not enough space between the sinks, and it's usually wet there too. It's wet because the towel dispenser is a long ways off, and so is the dryer.

The design in use

Here's my concept of what this design looks like in use. There aren't enough stalls to keep up with normal traffic flow, such as over lunch at the food court. So the line-up goes out into the hall.

At the theatre, there's a race to the ladies room in order to get in and out before curtain call, and people are literally pushing to get in ahead of the crowd. Really takes the edge off that expensive ticket, doesn't it?

Once the line-up starts, of course, the frustration of the space only gets worse. You can't get to either the towel holder or the hand-dryer without bumping into people.

Where does the stroller go?

Even though there are lots of moms at the mall with strollers, there is no accommodation for a stroller.

At newer airports, a curved entrance with no door is often used now, to make it easy for people to come and go with their hands full, wheeling, pushing and hauling all their stuff. I guess we're not supposed to have bags of stuff in the mall. But wait... we're shopping, right?

It might also be nice to have a place to hang all those bags while you wash your hands. So here's the thing -- whether a woman is in the mall or in a downtown food-court, she has stuff in her hands. A purse for sure, perhaps a briefcase, maybe a coat, maybe an umbrella, maybe a shopping bag, and maybe a child's hand.

Don't try to change behavior - plan for it

Women want to refresh their makeup at the mirror. We are not going to stop doing that anytime soon. And young women need a LOT of time for this activity, checking and re-checking hair, makeup, breath, and precise location of the yoga pants on the hip.

If the only mirrors are in front of the sink, there will be a crush while some try to wash their hands, and the rest primp. A more reasonable plan would be to put the mirrors off to the side, as a some better ladiesrooms do.

Maintenance

Part of the rationale for only one paper-towel dispenser located far from the sinks is likely the reduced maintenance. But I know of a couple of public washrooms that have an attendant wiping up almost full-time because of all the water dripping from everyone's hands. How does this make sense?

At a ladies locker room I recall a redesign that put jars of pot-pourri on the counters. Looked nice for the first week after the redesign. After that, they gathered dust. A year later, they were starting to look pretty disgusting. There was no maintenance plan.

Major overhaul needed

Kathryn Anthony, professor of architecture at University of Illinois thinks it's time for a change:

“Although we are all forced to use them whenever we’re away from home, many of today’s public restrooms raise a host of problems for women as well as men, adults as well as children.... It is now time for architects, facilities managers and building code officials to revisit public restrooms – and they need a major overhaul.

“Like it or not, most of us use public restrooms every day. Consequently, even the slightest improvements to this part of our built environment can have a tremendous positive impact on all segments of our population.”

References and Resources

A summary of Kathryn Anthony's article is here. In it, she highlights the challenge of changing demographics and the problem of opposite-sex caregivers who can't accompany an opposite sex person into a public bathroom. This means standing outside worrying about whether grandfather is okay or has he fallen?   

The American Restroom Association is a not-for-profit organization that is lobbying for changes to public restrooms to improve accessibility and increase privacy.

The World Toilet Expo 2006 will be held in Bangkok Nov 16-18. These folks are concerned with sanitation on a global scale.

The World Toilet Organization has a number of articles on their site of interest, such as this one, that identifies lack of bathroom privacy as a major issue for people. Ikea apparently surveyed home workers, and discovered this was one of the reasons people like working at home. I also learned that some Japanese bathrooms have noisemakers you can push to provide covering sounds and increase privacy. There is also a game, called Urgent, that lets you design a 3D public washroom. It's a bit slow to load, but looked like it could be interesting.

Stephanie Weaver has a great post on design issues in the bathroom, with a picture of a sink designed at kid height. This is so obvious, isn't it? Why aren't there more of these?