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Category: Customer Expectations

Customer Policies are for Customers

I’m sitting in the new North Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport. My AirTran flight has been delayed 8 hours because the plane taking me to Florida couldn’t leave Ohio.

Sitting in the breast pocket of my sport coat is a $10 gift certificate for food in the terminal, just enough to offset the $7.95 I paid for 24 hours of WiFi service.

Sure, the food voucher is nice. I’m not sure if the $25 travel voucher that came with it is very enticing to future flights. But the real question is this…

Are they really appeasing customers in a way that makes customers believe they care or is there something more or different they could do?

Because of the delay I’ve already made a number of itinerary changes including missing out on a planned dinner with friends. $10 worth of free food doesn’t replace 2 hours with friends I haven’t seen in months. And money for food was the least of my worries. I budgeted far more than that for tonight’s dinner.

As for me, I would rather have free WiFi than a food voucher. $7.95 for 24 hours feels like a ripoff. I might be the only one who feels this way, but from where I sit there are 6 laptops open nearby, none with one of those cellphone type attachments.

Sure, food is the easy option for the airline, so easy they have the forms pre-printed and stacked underneath the counter. But doing what the customer wants is always the best option.

Are your policies designed so that the customer gets what she wants? Do you even ask? Or do you have a rote response for everything so preplanned that you don’t even care what the customer thinks?

It’s something worth pondering.

I’ve got 6.5 more hours till takeoff, I think I’ll ponder a while:-)

-Phil

Are You Real Real or Just Fake Real?

I watched an interesting video this morning. Great way to start the day. It’s from the TED Conference. For those of you that don’t know TED, TED is a conference of really smart people, way smarter than me, doing really cool, mind-blowing presentations, usually 15 minutes or less.

Joseph Pine did a presentation on “what consumers want” that was quite eye-opening. He led us through the evolution of the marketplace from commodities to goods to services to experiences.

Then he blew me away with a simple graph about authenticity. Is your business authentic? That’s what customers really want – authentic experiences. Of course, there are degrees to authenticity. Fake Fake, Fake Real, Real Fake, and Real Real.

Find out what you and your business are. Check out the video at:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html

But be careful, you can get hooked on TED videos. I know I am.

Cheers!

-Phil

Setting the Bar Too High?

One of my favorite lessons learned from the Wizard of Ads is the Advertising Performance Equation. This equation gives a quick lesson into the factors that influence how well your advertising works. The equation looks like this: SoV x IQ x PEF x MPo = Sales

I won’t go into details about the equation right now, but one of those factors has been weighing on my mind.

PEF stands for Personal Experience Factor. Roy Williams (the Wizard) teaches that your advertising creates an expectation of your store. And when a customer experiences your store it will have an effect on the power of your ads. If you do not meet the customer’s expectations, all future ads will be seen/heard with disdain and not work as well. If you exceed the expectations created by your advertising, your business will grow.

The goal, then, is to ALWAYS exceed the customers’ expectations.

This can be done two ways. Set a really low bar that is always easy to beat or set the bar higher and higher with each passing day.

As Stewart B. Johnson said, “Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves – to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.”

I’ve always believed that success for Toy House falls more into line with Mr. Johnson. We need to constantly be striving to be better. Not better than our competition, but better than we were yesterday.

But with that said, there is some validity to setting a really low expectation. We see this every year in political debates. Who “won” the debate is primarily based on who met or exceeded the expectations.

In advertising, some say that you should never brag about your customer service because you raise a really high bar of expectations that will be increasingly difficult to exceed.

I’m not sure I’m fully in that camp. Raising the bar of expectations attracts a lot of customers. Plus, it gives you incentive to train harder, to prepare more, to be more creative in ways that you can please customers.

So, I’m just gonna lay it all on the line. I believe my staff are some of the finest retail workers in the toy industry. They are informed, helpful and friendly, and will give you the best shopping experience you can find in Jackson.

There. I’ve said it. The bar has been raised. I double dog dare you to give us the chance to exceed those expectations.

-Phil