Customer Crossroads

Consultant X Undercover Discovers the Truth about Multi-Tasking: "As if I've Got the Time"

Consultant X is conducting a long term ethnography project (of sorts) in an upscale food emporium.  Read the first installment here).  This week, he shares some insights that seriously relate to our work in managing customer experience effectively, and poses a challenge to the experts: what should he say to customers?  ~SA

As if I've Got the Time
Counter work, it turns out, involves much more multi-tasking than appears to the customer. In a typical transaction, you are first in public relations as you greet the customer, secondly in operations as you prepare the product, thirdly in sales as you attempt to up-sell or suggest another purchase, fourthly in accounting as you key-punch in the sale -- back to operations to package the product – then back to public relations to bid the customer farewell.

Now in recent developments, the marketing department has shown up and wants in on the action. There are a number of improvement programs out there that attempt to strengthen brand image by influencing the “customer experience” at the point of sale.

If the above point of sale sequence were constant and predictable, you might make a case for inserting a marketing message or striking up a dialogue with the customer at a pre-determined point in the sequence.

But it’s rare that the sequence remains intact. Customers just aren’t that accommodating -- when you are greeting them they are ordering, when you are preparing their order they are wandering around the store, when you are key-punching data into the system, they are ordering something else, (then changing their minds), when you move to checkout, they immediately give you their credit card before knowing the total. Not really with the program, are they?

However exit polls show that some kind of dialogue with customer leads to significantly better impressions of the store and its employees. Now let’s suppose for a moment that you are a shop owner, and one of your competitive advantages is the high quality of your product. And you want to experiment with the concept of leaving a good impression through greater engagement with the customer… How would you do it?

Here's the Reader Challenge
Here’s a challenge; you suggest a line or two for me to say to customers, and when during their visit I should say it.

(Post it in Comments below, and hey -- try not to embarrass me too much!). 

I’ll try out your line, and report back to you in future Fridays.  Kind of a Robo-Server thing. Although we don’t have exit polls, I will be able to tell you what the immediate reactions were to your lines, and you can estimate the future value from there.

Go ahead, post one now.

Next week we look at the surprising details customers are prepared to reveal about themselves – and what can we do with that information (?)

Picture Credit
www.capergreen.com/G-ServiceStyle.html

Hispanic Marketing: Understanding 41 Million Consumers

Interested in Hispanic marketing or research?  You will want to make time for this one-hour live web-cast on November 2 with Rose Marie Garcia Fontana, a qualitative research specialist in this area.  Details below:

When: Wednesday, November 2nd, 12:00 - 1:00 pm Eastern Time

Q-Casts are a free educational service offered by Qualitative Research Consultants Association.  Register to attend at: http://www.qrca.org/QCastRegistration.asp

Hispanic Qualitative Research: Second language barriers and opportunities
by Rose Marie Garcia Fontana & Carlos Garcia

This presentation will explore the barriers and opportunities of adapting qualitative research to the US Hispanic market. This session will provide valuable insights about the unique issues surrounding research with and for the Hispanic market.

Cultural and language differences will be discussed during the Qcast, and suggestions for adapting the entire research process will be covered. Case studies will be used throughout the presentation to illuminate the importance of using culturally appropriate research techniques with Hispanic respondents. Information on how to adapt study design, market selection, screener development, recruiting, discussion guide development, moderating, analysis and presentation of results will also be covered.

Participants will leave with an understanding of ways to ensure that research results can be understood within a Hispanic frame of reference, and how to maximize opportunities to reach the growing market segment of 41 million Hispanics. The economic clout of U.S. Hispanics is significant- they are estimated to have more than $650 billion in purchasing power, and that figure is expected to top $1 trillion by 2008. (LA Times, Josh Friedman) Learning more about how to reach this important group of consumers is in the best interests of anyone involved in marketing, advertising, and market research.

Rose Marie Garcia Fontana, PhD. is an independent consultant, working in the areas of General and Hispanic Market Research. She has served as a senior research associate for Garcia Research Associates, a market research firm located in Burbank. As a freelancer, she has worked for a wide variety of advertising, branding, and market research firms. Dr. Fontana has over thirteen years of experience in General and Hispanic Market Research as a focus group moderator and researcher, conducting in-depth interviews and ethnographies for universities, school districts, community non-profits, and federal agencies.

Carlos Garcia is an accomplished professional in both qualitative and quantitative research and a successful entrepreneur. Prior to founding Garcia Research Associates, Inc. in 1990, he directed the quantitative divisions of two minority marketing research firms. Mr. Garcia also held the position of Research Manager with Maritz Marketing Research in their Los Angeles office.

QRCA Conference 2005 Diary: Packaging Insights aka The Cover Does Matter as Much as the Book

The graphic above was my drawing from memory of a bottle of mouthwash.  This is the kind of exercise that Lauren Goldberg of Perception Research uses to research package equity.  Lauren is an outstanding presenter, and I learned a lot from her session at the conference.  There are lessons here that translate broadly to customer experience, aside from being really interesting stuff.

The One Thing You Need to Remember
Ms. Goldberg's presentation was titled, "It's not a beauty contest".  It's really about how you cut through the clutter and get attention in five seconds or less:  her mantra is "Unseen is Unsold".

Good packaging is packaging that is noticed in a competitive environment, can hold attention long enough to communicate, facilitates the shopping process, and communicates points of differentiation.

Why Packaging is Becoming More Important
Ms. Goldberg noted a number of trends that are increasing the focus on packaging as part of the marketing mix:

• Increasing clutter at point-of-sale
• She says about 1/3 of the items on a shelf are ignored by consumers
• Impulse purchases will ultimately determine the success of the brand -- you'll never become a loyal customer unless you try it at least once
• Products can no longer differentiate on quality alone

[From my perpsective, these trends apply to most consumer and business purchase decisions, not just packaged goods]

What a Great Package can do for your Product / Brand
A few of the things a good package can do for you:

• Shelf-pop visibility – consistently break through visual clutter and get the product into the considered set
• Find-ability and shop-ability – help shoppers quickly locate your product, and the specific variety they want
• Solve consumer problems e.g. Duracell multi-battery pack – solves the customer problem of knowing which batteries are fresh, and which have been used before by providing storage for the new batteries
• Meet needs of different segments.  E.g. plastic squeeze ketchup bottle versus glass, different sizes, etc.
• Reinforce brand attributes, such as “high-tech” or “fun”
• Support premium pricing – tall versus short bottle, unique versus standard shapres, plastic versus glass
• Help people understand how to use or apply the product -- do you squeeze it out, pour it on, spray it...?
• Increase usage of the product – example is fridge packs for soft-drink cans, which have produced increased consumption

Ms. Goldberg says over 85% of new product introductions fail, probably in part due to weak design.  As she says, "Unseen is unsold".

Can People See It?
One of the most fascinating things to me was the data on shelf placement for visibility. 

Arm-level is the best.  Eye-level is 10% less visible. Above eye-level is 30% less visible. One shelf below arm-level is 10% less visible. The bottom shelf is 20% less visible.

[I have found this to be very true of brochures on display in bank branches.  The single best location is beside a line-up area.  If the brochures don't disappear from there, you are showing the wrong brochure.]

How to Research
Starting customer insight work at the pre-design stage can save a lot of grief, according to Ms. Goldberg.  This way, you can give some direction to the design team about  existing elements that have equity (like the Listerine bottle shape), and what is important in the shopping and purchasing decision, as well as usage considerations. 

When conducting qualitative research, Ms. Goldberg does not use creativity screening questions because she believes they bias the research. [I don’t either, but this is a common practice]

She reinforced several times that the challenge is to determine which packaging works best, not which packaging respondents like best.  Which means you need to do your testing in context, in an environment that is as cloase to reality as you can make it.

Some Packaging that Works
Examples of good package design mentioned:

• Seagram’s Crown Royal – the bottle is easy to spot on a shelf, because it has a different shape than the competitors, recognizable even in silhouette
• Simply Orange – this fresh juice bottle stands out from the crowd of 2 litre cartons in the fridge compartment.  It's been effective enough that it has attracted imitators

Packages that have good recognition even without the product name: Tide, Fantastic, Bayer Aspirin, Marlboro, Crackerjack, Pepto-Bismol, SunMaid Raisins.

Noteworthy Trends
You've probably noticed a few of these trends yourself, and they don't just affect packaging, they're actually pretty pervasive in the services world as well:

1. Packaging enhancements – glossy finishes, foil, etc.
2. Improved private label packaging
3. Globalization has increased the total number of brands
4. Increase in proprietary packaging structures
5. Development of optimum category layouts (example she mentioned – organics usually in the top right of a shelf display, that’s where consumers know to look for them)
6. Auditing existing designs to uncover signs of “wear-out” -- preventive maintenance
7. Observing behavior in actual environments across the full life-cycle of usage
8. Quantifying packaging and point-of-sale return on investment

My Take
Not all packaged goods marketing exports well to the customer experience world.  But there's a lot we can all learn.  Like attention to detail.  Like making sure people can find our service in a very noisy and cluttered world.  Remembering that what is unseen is unsold.  And that it's about what works for customers, not necessarily what is pretty to look at. 

QRCA Conference 2005: Frederick's of Hollywood Image Makeover

I thought this "No Cruising Zone" sign from Sunset Strip in West Hollywood was a good metaphor for us as we think about customer experience.  Nothing stands still for long; not the competition, and certainly not the customers.   

 Re-branding Frederick's of Hollywood

The biggest highlight of the QRCA conference for me this year was listening to Renee White Fraser talk about the process of re-branding Frederick's of Hollywood.

You will likely remember Frederick's as I did, as a rather trashy home of lingerie.  It's a relatively small operation compared to Victoria's Secret, and there is considerable customer overlap, wtih 80% of Frederick's customers also shopping at VS. 

Considerable qualitative research was used to dig deep with buyers and non-buyers, followed by quant, which ultimately led to a shift in the perception of the brand, and significantly improved profitability.

In addition to customer research, Fraser interviewed about 24 of the organization's executive team about their perceptions of the brand, competitors and the customer, by channel.  There was not good alignment among the executive, who in many cases held opinions and perceptions about Frederick's customers that ran contrary to the facts.  Executive alignment was essential to implement a new brand strategy across multiple channels (true words, often heard).

Much of the customer research was conducted in homes in groups of two or three people, not in a focus group room.  Recruits were asked to invite one or two friends over to their home, and bring their favorite piece of lingerie.  Exercises in the discussions included creating collages of the brand image. 

One of Fraser's interesting points was to suggest looking at what is omitted, not just what is included in things such as collages and discussions. 

The essence of the brand's DNA turns out to be about feminine empowerment: 

"Frederick's shows women what is sexy and fun and gives them permission to be that person"

Non-customers tended to associate Frederick's with stripper-wear.  Frederick's customers saw the brand more as fun and empowering. 

So the challenge in devising new imagery was to find images that brought in the prospects wtihout alienating the customers.  At this stage, the project tested images using quantitative methods (using mall intercept studies). 

One of the very interesting findings is that when the research team tested the same model-pose-outfit combinations with a Victoria's Secret brand logo versus a Frederick's brand logo, the Frederick's image tested "trashy" and the Victoria's Secret image tested "sexy".  (This type of finding would be present with a strong brand in any category, but it still really illustrates the power of brand in influencing expectations and perceptions.)

VS was seen as more passively sexy (feminine, soft, classy, subdued, nurturing), and Frederick's as more aggressive, fun and bold (fun, feathers, bold, confident, sexy, fearless).

This research was conducted in 2002, and subsequently Frederick's has shifted perceptions significantly, by changing their advertising and their imagery, as well as some of their product line.   Interestingly, Victoria's Secret has shifted as well:  they were perhaps a bit too soft when the research was done, but may have over-corrected on the sexy empowerment theme.  Check out the links and decide for yourself.

Qualitative Research Conference 2005: Beverly Hills Diary

I'm here in Beverly Hills at the Qualitative Research Consultant's Conference.  Beverly Hills is not a location I ever aspired to visit, frankly, and I wouldn't be here this year if I wasn't a speaker, but now that I am here, I thought I would share some informal observational research with you.

The Beverly Hilton is an impressive hotel, which is just finishing up a major reno.  I had friendly efficient service from the front desk staff, who advised me they were upgrading my room to one with a balcony.   

TIP: telling your customers when you are doing something extra for them is a good way to make them feel special.  I wasn't told why, and really don't need to know why.  Just make me feel special when you can.

The room is very nice, with soft caramel and corn-silk colors.  A fluffy snuggly bed.  A hug flat screen plasma TV on one wall (corner of which visible in picture).  A 13" flat screen LCD TV in the bathroom.  Some interesting design features generally, and lovely furniture.  There are real drawers in the bathroom that you can stash all your little jars in.  Real wood hangers with proper full-sized hooks.

So far, all good.  But check out the desk.  It looks really nice.  But the desk is about 4" too high for comfortable work at a computer.  The desk chair (gorgeous, really) has a very limited height adjustment.  So I had to add a pillow.  I haven't found the phone directory yet, which is my usual choice to solve this problem. 

So as you can see in the picture, the computer is on the little side-bar table, which is SLIGHTLY shorter, but still quite uncomfortable.  I'm already getting stiff in the neck, and several days of this may truly warrant a massage. If I was a regular to LA, I would be looking for a different hotel for this reason alone.  When clients' exec assistants book me into hotels, I often ask them if the hotel has a decent desk. (Of course, they have no idea about desks.  But they do know if their boss likes the place, so that's my proxy.)

Tip: try the stuff, sample the experience yourself.  I mean REALLY try it.  Try working at the desk, try sitting in the chair, go through the account opening process.  Just do it.  Don't even think about launching a change to your customers without at least sampling the thing yourself.  Of course I would like you to hire me to research it fully.  But I would still suggest you do a little beta testing of your own. 

Judi's Deli
If you're visiting Beverly Hills in the near future:  try Judi's deli near Belmont and Wilshire.  Friendly, fast, and they make a great breakfast sandwich.  You can browse USA Today while the plastic surgeons drop in for coffee and bagels.

In Other News: looking for new PDA
I would have more pictures for you, but I'm holding out for a PDA that has a reasonable camera, plus built in WI-FI, and flash memory. Basically, a cross between a PALM ZIRE 72 and a Life Drive.  (Meanwhile, I don't always like trotting out the digital camera.)  If you hear of this device, please let me know.

My tech guy Charles tells me that corporate buyers won't buy anything with a built-in digital camera, which is resulting in a shift in the marketplace.

A New Feature:  Consultant Undercover
One of my associates has decided to re-enter the real world now and again, when he isn't too busy with projects.  Over the summer, he ran a crew for Habitat for Humanity.  Now he's working a few days a week in an upscale food market.  His initial observations on retailing have been pretty interesting.  We'll be running the occasional article starting later this week.  Stay tuned.

Consultant Undercover: Buying Dinner

My associate Mr. X is working a part time in an upscale food emporium to stay in touch with reality between gigs.  Since we have created a few training programs together -- all directed at people in service roles -- this has been a real eye opener for him.  Let's face it -- it's easy to suggest how people should act in a customer service situation, but real customers are often considerably different than what we imagine them to be.  The jobs are more complicated and more stressful than we suspect. 

Over a cafe americano at Starbucks, I suggested that X capture these observations and insights as a contributor to this blog.  Amazingly enough, he ultimately agreed.  His condition: he meant no disrespect to the store owner or the customers, so it has to be anonymous. Okay, I said.  It's not like we're the Wall Street Journal here -- we have standards, but this seems reasonable.

So here's the first installment of consultant undercover, courtesy of Mr. X.

Mrs. V Buys Dinner 

"I could tell she was going to be trouble from the get-go. If it’s possible to look both aimless and hostile at the same time, she managed it. Picture her in her early sixties, slack beige raincoat, damp grey hair, silk scarf, scowling at the display case.

Me: Hi, can I help you?
She: What’s that?
M: Lasagne.
S: Doesn’t look like Lasagne.
M: Sausage Lasagne.
S: Doesn’t look like Lasagne.
M: (lying) No it doesn’t, does it.

S: Is it any good?
M: I’ve never had it, but all our products are very good.
S: How much is it?
M: $3.25 per 100 grams
S: What’s that mean? (legitimate question)
M: I can price this piece for you, if you like.
S: It’s gonna be about 5 bucks.
M: (reading the scale) $4.77
S: See, I told ya.
M: (nothing)

S: How do you heat it up?
M: Well, I’d put it in a warm oven for a half hour or so.
S: That’s cooking.
M: Well, no – it’s warming. You can put it in a microwave, but that’s a dangerous way to go.
S: Yeah, it is. Well… I think I’ll get something else. (walks out the door)
M: Thank you, have a good weekend."

Guilt as a Marketing Device

When does guilt work as a motivator?  Let's look at some examples of where it works and where it doesn't.

Free Gifts from Charities
The "free" Christmas cards have started arriving, and they've upped the ante:  the packages now include things like gift-wrap, ribbon, bows and even a pen.    You only have three choices about what to do with this stuff:

1. Recycle it -- which seems like a waste
2. Use it -- and then you really HAVE to make a donation
3. Repackage it and send it back -- this doesn't seem to reduce the number of packages like this I get

This guilt play must work well for some charities, since they are at it continuously.

But not all charities.  The Red Cross sends me newsletters about how they are putting my money to work helping around the world.  Medicins Sans Frontiers sends me a magazine that tells me about the serious problems around the world, but also how they are helping.  My universities send me stuff about wonderful new buildings, new programs, award winning research and the like.  The motivator is about painting a picture of a wonderful future vision.  Guilt does work, but it has its limitations.

The Late Pickup Problem at Daycare
The great pscyhologist Daniel Kahneman tried to help a daycare early in his career.  The daycare's problem was too many parents coming late to pick up their children.  The daycare wanted to try charging a fee for late pickup.  So they tried this, and tracked the effect.

The frequency of late pickups increased. 

The guilt at leaving a child late, and making the staff stay late was motivating parents.  The small fee wiped out other motivators, and basically made it "okay" to be late.  I call these "permission" fees. 

Guilt Versus Permission Fees 
My city is planning to limit the number of garbage bags we are supposed to leave at the curb.  Voluntary enforcement is what they have in mind.  One councillor thinks there should be a fee for putting out more than the suggested number of bags.  Personally, this sounds like a permission-fee to me, and I think it will backfire.  Social controls are potentially a much more powerful motivator. 

Unfortunately, city councillors may not know as much about human motivation as they should to make good decisions. 

"Please keep this email for future reference"

How often have you seen those words in an e-mail?  I just saw them again in the subscription confirmation for a business blog.  Over the last few years, I have subscribed and unsubscribed to literally hundreds of things like this, and so have you.  If there is some control freak out there who actually keeps and files all this stuff, they should get some kind of award. 

We could give another award to the folks who have time to read all the legalese they have agreed to.  As one executive I met put it recently, "I don't have time to be a responsible citizen [and read all these agreements]".

We need to ruthlessly examine customer communications for this kind of nonsense and surgically remove it whenever we find it.   And  forget that "everyone does it" -- you know that never washed with your mother, and it won't wash with your customers either.

We all have limited band-width:  save your customer's attention for meaningful messages.