Customer Experience Crossroads

Best of the blogfest, or how to increase your traffic using a crazy topic

I've been away and chronically behind, and so missed reading many of the posts from other bloggers taking part in the bathroom blogfest 2007. Catching up today, I wanted to mention a couple of posts that caught my eye. As well as a few marketing observations.

Interesting Posts - not an exhaustive list by any means!
From Kate Rutter at Adaptive Path - Office bathrooms as key indicators of team culture. Great article. Reminded me of the private bathrooms that executives in some industries get as part of their perks, and what this might suggest about the caste system in place in those organizations.

"The point is that bathrooms signal what’s important to the team culture:

• Does the bathroom feel more personal than institutional?
• Do you care about keeping the bathroom clean because you care about the other people that use it?
• Can you get a good look at yourself in a good mirror before that big meeting so that you don’t embarrass your team with spinach in your teeth?
• Do you enjoy seeing artworks created by your team members?
• And the big one…are you trusted not to misuse the supply of toilet paper?"

Her translation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the office bathroom is worth the drive over to read. For extra credit: see if you can translate your product or service into Maslow.

Laurence-Hélène at Blog Till You Drop updated us on the trend of luxury public/private bathrooms, a trend that is spreading. There are now three of these: London, Japan, Paris. And clever companies are using these spaces to encourage trial of their products. I have heard that some nightclub ladiesrooms offer additional services on busy nights, like manicure services and quick massages.

Sports arenas appear to have among the worst ladiesrooms anywhere.

Reshma Anand reported seeing an improvement in public washrooms in India since the blogfest last year. And wondered if more fathers would like to have change tables in the men's room.

Katie Clark at Practical Katie was dismayed to see a bathroom that subordinated usability to design in a new library. There's no place to put down a purse or anything else.

Marketing observations

You can get a lot of people talking about something with a blogfest. Many of the less well-established blogs on the list saw major traffic boosts as a result of their participation. But the big jump in traffic on the group blog set up by organizer Stephanie Weaver was especially interesting to me. She sent in a note to Blogger, letting them know, and they highlighted the blog. Instant jump to thousands of page views. of course Blogger would not have done this if they didn't think the concept was interesting. So the formula remains the same -- you can get publicity if you have something interesting to say.

Extra touches at convention hotel ladiesroom

When I go to a conference, I always envision a time to relax and rejuvenate. More often, you find yourself mentally stimulated by physically exhausted. You're dragging around bags of stuff from the trade show, handouts you picked up at the sessions, plus your own works-in-progress. After several late nights and early mornings the wear and tear is starting to show.

So when a convention centre goes to some extra effort to add comforting touches, it is noticeable. The Westin Bayshore was practically flawless in this area. They had creative buffet and finger foods, things like mashed-potato bars (looks like ice cream but the sprinkles are cheese and bacon bits). They used coffee mugs and go-cups instead of weensie hotel coffee cups.

And the bathrooms had actual hand towels, rolled up in stacks, in addition to the paper dispensed kind. Plus this nice basket of hand cream and mouthwash. Just the thing for late in the day when you need a little pick-me-up.

Interestingly, there was lots of angst expressed about the environmental aspects of this, but we used the stuff anyway, and appreciated just that little bit of luxury.

Dining upscale casual and how this has improved the ladiesroom

There is a phenomenon in the dining out category that I would call upscale casual. The food has become much more sophisticated in presentation and seasoning, but it is still approachable. The menus are familiar, often a blend of cuisines, and lacking the stamp of an individual chef, as a bistro would have. These are menus that could be franchised.

The service is very friendly and down-to-earth -- it is identical to what you would encounter in anything from a Hard Rock Cafe to a Kelsey's Roadhouse.

These establishments represent better eating in suburbia and smaller urban centres, something that never used to be available.

The big change is in the decor. Instead of themes like Irish pub, rock'n'roll or country kitchen, with a decor package that varies only in the details from location to location, this new type of casual dining lets the guest be more of the star of the show. The guest is not visiting a theme park, they are visiting a private club.

Wildcraft in Waterloo is a great example of this trend. There are usually lots of high ceilings, dark wood, and better appointments, often leather upholstery.There may be a very visible wine cellar as the feature point in the room, as you see here. These are people who have refined tastes, but still want to be relaxed. They want some of the experience of what we used to call 'fine dining', but without the attitude.

The food is described as "new American comfort food", and the experience is adventurous and independent:

Wildcraft is adventurous and independent. Wildcraft is fun, fresh, natural and dynamic.

The ladiesroom experience

One of the best things about this trend is what it means for the ladiesroom. Others in our party were encouraging those who 'didn't have to go' to 'go anyway', just so they could see the premises.

Going down the stairs beside the wine cellar, you enter into a lounge area. I expect that this is a vibrant place in the evening, with people making calls and making time. What a change from the barren hallway, where you must squeeze past others in order to squeeze into the bathroom. This is a foyer!

Once inside, the club-like appointments continue. More wood, more candles, and high-style design in evidence everywhere. This sink was particularly thoughtful, with a place to hook a handbag.

We don't ever want to be without stimulation, and the additional source of advertising is always welcome. So of course there is now video.

I was impressed. These appointments are much nicer than many private clubs, and rival the appointments in dining rooms that charge three or four times the price of a meal here. Note the full-height cubicle doors, again in wood, in the background of the picture below. This is not a temple to fine food, it is a temple to feeling good, feeling relaxed, and feeling special.

I was glad to have the place almost to myself, and my trusty Razr, seen below.

Taking the brand into the bathroom, and other blogfest items

In a retail space designed to profile a brand, what should the bathrooms look like? This question is addressed on Flooring the Consumer by guest author Marianne Cone. Ms. Cone visited the M&M's World and Hershey's stores in Times Square and discovered... that all the attention on the brand image completely disappears with the bathroom. M&M did nothing interesting with theirs, and Hershey's doesn't have a bathroom for customers. According to Marianne Cone, they missed a huge opportunity. I agree. Customers do notice. And we would have to think that both these stores are popular with children. [d'oh] And children have much less ability to 'just hold it' than adults. Why not capitalize on this, and make moms and dads love the brand even more with kid-friendly, themed bathrooms?

It seems that carpet and tile retailers have a better grasp on these issues than destination entertainment retailers. In another recent post on Flooring, CB Whittemore reports on a bathroom in a carpet and tile store. A little attention and creativity has customers raving about the bathroom, and becoming inspired  for their own renovations.

Iris Shreve Garrott at Checking Out and Checking In notes that the National Zoo has amusing animal facts in their bathrooms, taking the zoo customer experience into the bathroom. See the poster about hippo poop here.

Disney gets it, and tends to continue their area theme right into the bathroom, according to Becky Carroll writing at Customers Rock. If you don't, the magic kind of disappears, doesn't it?

Other notable posts:

Katie Clark, writing at Practical Katie, had to fight to get drop-down shelves installed in the ladiesroom at her library, and counts it as a big achievement. [Why are some things just so hard?]

Carolyn Townes writes about that well-known cultural phenomenon -- the women meeting in the bathroom and talking. I've noticed bathrooms in clubland are getting larger, no doubt to accommodate.

Other bloggers participating in the blogfest are listed on the blogroll to your right (or click through if you are reading the feed).

A family bathroom for a family restaurant

There's a neighborhood in Toronto we call Little India. It's really more Little Pakistan, but whatever. There's an iconic restaurant there called the Lahore Tikka House. It's been under renovation for at least two years, but in the fashion of this culture, they've continued to run the restaurant the whole time, building as resources permit. The staff are delightful, and the food is excellent, plentiful, and inexpensive.

When I last visited, the renovations were really starting to take shape. I was visiting with my parents. My mom, who has baked a few loaves in her day, looked in the window at the bakers making naan in the huge tandoor oven. They invited her in for a closer look. Delightful!

On our way to the ladiesroom (more on that in a minute) I commented on how good the renos were looking, and we got to peek behind the curtain. What a great way to make your customers feel welcome.

The bathroom areas were really nicely appointed, with beaded shoes mounted above the doors, nice tile and roomy entry ways.

Inside, what really caught my interest was the family bathroom. Look how roomy this is, and how it has been built with knowledge of the local market. I loved that they have a step-stool, just like you would have at home, to help the little ones wash their hands.

When I saw the basket of supplies available, I knew this place really values their customers and is trying to be a special destination. There were disposable diapers in various sizes, baby wipes, and baby lotion.

Perhaps there will be a need for frequent re-stocks, but what of it? it's a small price to pay to be clearly superior in every way than every other place in the neighborhood.

They have always paid close attention to cleanliness. When they had their huge outdoor area in the summer, before building the new edifice, there was a roomy outdoor washing station with sinks and hand-towels. A great idea for a place with a lot of finger food, and families.

On your next trip to Toronto, ask your cabbie to take you by -- most likely, he won't even need directions, since it is so well known. And let me know if the men's room is just as nice, or even nicer.

Cleaning up the ladiesroom: 2007 bathroom blogfest runs Oct. 29 – Nov. 2

The bathroom blogfest was cooked up on a let's-get-acquainted phone call between me and San Diego blogger Stephanie Weaver (Experienceology) a little over a year ago. We wanted a blogfest topic that related to customer experience but not in a specialized way … we tagged it ladiesrooms. I don't think it changed the world, but people seemed to enjoy the event, so we are hosting it again, this time with the addition of the able organizational skills of C.B. Whittemore (Flooring the Consumer) as part of the organization team.

What's the point of this? Well, every human being has to use the bathroom. But most organizations act like the bathroom is just a nuisance. They tend to be hard to find, tucked away into a corner and often unsatisfactory in a number of ways. In a public place, we are at our most vulnerable in the bathroom, conducting our private ablutions in front of perfect strangers. For a night at the theatre or an afternoon at a ballgame, and many other situations, we ladies can usually count on losing out on some fun by having to wait in line. 

As human beings ourselves, we bloggers would like to see some improvement. And we want to celebrate the improvements we do see. 

Along the way, we'll all be using this approach to illustrate the ways of deconstructing, innovating and generally doing a better job on the ladiesroom. Gents are certainly allowed, even encouraged to join in. It's a big tent, after all, an issue shared by the largest group imaginable – all of humanity.

Like all such grassroots projects, this thing has taken on a life of its own. There are a total of 20 bloggers taking the plunge, and more are welcome to join in. I've listed the group below, but for the duration, I'm going to add a category to the blogroll.  We're also trying a Facebook group, to see if that helps us stay connected. [So far, it doesn't seem to be working. Personally, I don't think the group application is all that useful yet, but stay tuned.] There is a consolidated blogfest blog planned to host all the posts – a one-stop shop for all your bathroom blogfesting needs.  And we have two new logos this year. That's my fault, as I am the chief logo-designer, and I didn't like the first one – a pixellated pansy – so I built a second one. But there are pansies sprouting everywhere, so others clearly like it.

There will be posts on this topic throughout the week of Oct. 29^th – Halloween week, appropriate for a scary topic such as this. So grab your miniature chocolate bars and candy kisses, and join in the infotainment. Or just pass by the posts with this logo, and we'll talk again when our regular programming resumes.

Here's the list of bloggers and blogs:

• Anna Farmery—The Engaging Brand
• Becky Carroll—Customers Rock!
• C.B. Whittemore—Flooring the Consumer
• Carolyn Townes—Spirit Women
• Claudia Schiepers—Life and its little pleasures
• Dee McCrorey—The Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur
• Ed Pell—K+B DeltaVee
• Helene Blowers—Library Bytes
• Iris Shreve Garrott—checking out and checking in
• Kate Rutter—Adaptive Path
• Katia S. Adams—Transcultural
• Katie Clark—Practical Katie
• Laurence Helene Borel—Blog Till You Drop
• Linda Tischler—Fast Company Now
• Maria Palma—Customers Are Always
• Marianna Hayes—Results Revolution
• Reshma Anand—Qualitative Research
• Sandra Renshaw—Purple Wren
• Sara Cantor—The Curious Shopper
• Stephanie Weaver—Experienceology
• Toby Bloomberg—Diva Marketing

You can also keep up by scanning technorati or del.icio.us or flickr using the tag, ladiesrooms.

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?

Integrated Customer Experience Applied to the Bathroom

When you are trying to build a branded customer experience, you have some very specific operational levers you can use as a manager.** When I start to think about a client's situation, I systematically work through all of the operational dimensions to make sure we consider everything. So let's do this together with the ladies room, and see what we learn.

Product

Doesn't really seem to apply to the ladiesroom, as we are assuming that the basic functionality exists. If your ladiesroom is missing the basic functionality expected, you're wasting your effort on anything else.

The term product can open debates about what it is you are actually selling. My solution is this: it's the literal answer a customer would give if you asked them what they are buying.  So Disney may be selling "happy memories", but if you ask people what they just paid for, they will likely say "admission to Disneyland". A bank may be selling "financial security", but people say they are paying for "a chequing account". It's a way of distinguishing product features and benefits from other elements of customer experience.

People

Unless you have employees holding hand-towels in your public washrooms, this isn't about your employees, their roles and their behavior. Except that you might train them how to give directions to the ladiesroom discreetly. You need to have standards for the cleaners. And some approach to the bathroom key if you are going to make people ask for a key.

Price

When I was growing up, the bathrooms in department stores cost 10 cents to use, so my Mom and I shared. [Thank goodness those days are mostly over.] So price isn't really a lever with the ladies room, because we are going to assume you don't charge for it directly. However, your customers will expect all of your facilities to "match". Best Western's facilties can be less luxurious than Hilton's, but need to be better than Motel 6. This is why we talk about "integrated customer experience" - it all needs to fit together.

Communications

Your marketing communications probably don't need to reference the ladies room. But...consider the tremendous word of mouth McDonald's has had over the years for their bathrooms, which are almost always amply proportioned, fitted out with baby changing tables, and reasonably clean. It's a part of their brand promise, isn't it? And in their early days, this was a point of differentiation from the local greasy spoon. Now it's the minimum we expect, especially from a national franchise. If you are ever in doubt as to the minimum standards for a public bathroom, check out the McDonald's in your area, because they have defined the line. If you are below this standard, most people are going to think you're cheap or uncaring.

McD's also seems to take the viewpoint that we are all their customer -- which we pretty much are -- therefore don't worry about people coming in just to use your washroom. There are McD's that police their washrooms for non-customers, but they are infrequent, and are usually in troubled neighborhoods.

So we owe a debt of gratitude to McDonald's for raising the bar on bathrooms in the past.

Place & Process

These are the two dimensions left, and they are intimately linked in the ladiesroom. Because the place determines the process. So let's look next at the two P's that relate to the ladiesroom.

There's a lot to say about that, and we'll be saying it in the next post.

References, Resources, and more about the Bathroom Blogfest:

** Six rings of value: We call them the six rings of value, because they all link together to create an experience. There's a nice graphic here.

McDonald's: an improv group put a tuxedoed bathroom attendant in the Times Square McDonald's, and handed out free amenities like combs and cologne, explaining it was a head office promotion. People seemed to accept this at face value. Read the amazing story and see the pics here.

The bathroom can be a restroom, a place of restorative calm. Reshma Anand tells why she loves the bathrooms at the Taj Mahal hotel. CB Whittemore provides examples of the bathroom as work of art. These are differentiated bathrooms, memorable bathrooms, bathrooms that show imagination and pride of ownership.

The bathroom is clearly a place of secrets. Sara posts pictures about handwashing, and statistics about who does and doesn't wash their hands, including Sara herself.  Maria Palma reveals that she is uncomfortable in bathrooms, and amuses herself by studying shoes.

Differentiating and the Zone of Goodness

Does a better bathroom count with customers?

This is an important question, since virtually all service level improvements cost money, and we know plumbing is always expensive.

Last week at the qualitative conference, I told colleagues Tima and Michelle about the Bathroom Blogfest project. They quickly started talking about nightclubs with interesting ladiesrooms. In fact, they easily came up with an amazing list of clubs with memorable and interesting ladies rooms. There was one club with separate stall areas, but a mixed gender sink and mirror area. Another has one way mirrors that lets the ladies see the men primping in the mirror. Another offers free spa services inside the ladiesroom.  (I'm still hoping for pictures to share with you, but they may have other things on their minds when they are clubbing!)

The Theory (Stay with me here, this is important)

If we were to measure consumer choices in any dimension, we are looking for a relationship along these lines: more (or sometimes less) of the dimension translates into more purchasing, more loyalty, more satisfaction, etc. The dimension could be anything such as speed of service, choice of colors, knowledgeable staff, convenient location.

Minimum acceptable standard

There are three zones of importance here, divided by two threshold lines. The first threshold is the minimum acceptable standard. If your performance is below this standard, you will see an impact on loyalty and repurchasing. All of this is pretty specific to each category, and sometimes to each customer segment.

For example, consider location convenience relative to the drycleaning category. There is some distance beyond which you will not travel no matter how much you like the drycleaner. This would be the minimum acceptable standard for convenience.

But there is likely a limit to how much "more convenient location" translates to loyalty. Once you've got door-to-door delivery, you've pretty much maxed out on convenience.

Hygiene factors

You might hear the phrase "hygiene factor" from a marketer. A hygiene factor is a dimension that has to meet a minimum standard, but once having met that, more is not better. Usually this is something like cleanliness: something can be dirty or clean, but there's no benefit to "more clean".

With other dimensions, customers can tell the difference between the minimum standard and a better standard, but it does not influence their behavior. Wait-time is often a dimension like this. Long line-ups can be frustrating, but people won't always move their business just to get a short line-up.

So there are really two kinds of hygiene factors: dimensions where there is no potential for differentiation, and dimensions where we can tell the difference, but we don't care about the difference.

I suspect that most shopping mall owners and other places with public washrooms think of bathroom quality as a hygiene factor. If it's clean and functional, that's all it has to be. These businesses make sure they are in the "minimum standard" zone, and stop there.

The Differentiation Line and Zone of Goodness

A differentiated customer experience is always up there in the Zone of Goodness, where we can see the difference, and we care about the difference, enough that it influences our behavior.   

What the heck does all this mean for the ladiesroom???
I don't think we choose a shopping mall or an airline based on the quality of the ladiesroom.  But it certainly registers as part of the total experience. Everything goes into the mix of emotion and memory, and we know that our emotional judgements about things affect our interest in repeating the experience.

We also know that our minimum standards are starting to go up, up, up in almost every dimension. If you don't believe me, consider the free spa services Tima and Michelle told me about.

More on the Bathroom Blogfest 2006:

Yesterday:  the bathroom in your establishment is a thin-slice, litmus-test for the rest of your experience. 

Bloggers participating are listed in the first group of blogroll links over on the left.

Thanks to David Polinchock at Experience Manifesto for picking up our theme and posting on the Blogfest. Guys do care.

Stephanie Weaver at Experienceology discusses bathrooms around the world, and sets the minimum standard: clean and functional.

CB Whittemore at Flooring the Customer examines the quality dimension, ranging from horrific to over-the-top.

Reshma Anand wonders why there can't be gender specific bathrooms on airplanes.

Linda Tischler asks the key question: Would you want your wife to pee in this place?

We are continuing to sign up bloggers, so send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view etc.

Bathroom Blogfest: Clubs

Welcome to this week's Bathroom Blogfest.  I'll have a few posts this week about the ladiesroom experience, and so will some other fine bloggers, listed at the end of this post.

I thought we should start with some of the good examples, deconstruct those, and then take those lessons on to the less savory aspects.

So here's a pop-quiz to get us started.

One of these images is the ladies room in an a members-only private club. The other is in a public restaurant. They're in the same office complex. A or B???

A

B

If you guessed that A was the private club and B was the public restaurant, you are correct.  The private club has some nice amenities of course. There are hand-towels stacked up against the wall, and mouthwash with disposable cups, as well as hand lotion. The decor doesn't appear to have changed since the 70s, and the rest of the club is even dustier. The ladiesroom stalls are the same metal things you would find in a baseball stadium.  There is one really weird amenity, actually -- it's a sonic glasses cleaning machine. I've never seen anyone use it. It looks like it hasn't been cleaned in a while.

The beautiful wooden door is the cubicle in the ladiesroom in a restaurant in the same office complex as the club. There are actually two hooks on the door, one for your briefcase or purse, and one for your coat. And the stalls have a mirror, so you can check your lipstick. 

All the dark wood and amenities make the Soul of the Vine ladiesroom a much nicer, more elegant environment than the Ontario Club, which will be no surprise to anyone who has been to both. It's not just the food that's better. The service is better. The ladiesrooms are better. They are much better at making you feel special. Amazingly enough, the Soul of the Vine is very affordable. Its cousin, Far Niente, located one floor up is at a much higher price point.

But either one is a much better place to take a client, and these places are in the heart of Toronto's financial district. 

A great many private clubs are struggling to stay alive, and it's no surprise, really. They have not moved with the times. They don't have business centres where the free-agent nation can drop in and work, because they have assumed we have an office downtown.

The food is often pedestrian at best. The coffee is often poor, and served in little cups that are half the size most people now want.

It's not really a ladiesroom, it's a litmus test for the whole operation. Or a thin-slice of the experience, to use the Gladwellian term. 

Meet the ladies here.

It's all happening at the loo

The ladies have had it and we're going on a quest to clean up the ladiesrooms of the world. What started as a casual conversation between Stephanie Weaver and I has quickly turned into the Bathroom Blogfest.

During the week of October 30, we'll be plunging into the ladies room and posting on the customer experience. Does it matter to your customers? And if it does, how does yours stack up? What's the good, bad and ugly of the ladiesroom experience?  If someone hired us to fix this horror-show, what would we all suggest be done? Tune in to these fine blogs Hallowe'en week (and isn't that fitting?) to get the nitty gritty on the ladiesroom:

• Experiencology
• Church of the Customer
• Flooring the Consumer
• What I do for a living
• the curious shopper
• Customers Are Always
• Fast Company Now

We were pretty chuffed when Linda Tischler (Fast Company) and Jackie Huba (Church of the Customer) agreed to scrub in. And Reshma Anand (What I do for a living) will be giving her thoughtful perspective from Bangalore. But there's still room in the cubicle if you want to squeeze in.

And if you have ideas, comments, pet peeves, and even better - PICTURES -- of the best and the worst, please send me a note.