100 years ago, if I wanted to buy something or use a service then the likelihood is that I would take a physical walk to a shopfront somewhere and talk to an individual. I would do this during daylight hours and could be reasonably certain that I would be talking to a person that wanted my business. If I subsequently had a problem with the product or service then I could walk back to the shop or office on the high street and discuss my concerns.
Customers were closer in both a physical and social proximity sense, and I would probably know by reputation what sort of service I would receive. Several leaps in technology have changed the market since then, with the latest being Internet, Mobile and Social. The Internet was a great disruptive leveller for business that could be remote in that I could put money into my website and play on a relatively level playing field with large business.
Great websites are commodities now. If it isn’t simple to locate the product that you want to buy then you’ll probably go elsewhere. This pre-supposes that you know what you want to buy, which is something that we’ll come back to in a future post.
For the moment I want to talk about the concept of customer service and expectation. I have been talking with several customers who are finding it challenging to square away how they serve customers on mass in a repeatable and scalable perspective (cost and consistency of high quality experience). There are such a myriad of ways that a customer can engage with your organisation and they differ according to time, place, need, enabling technology and good old fashioned customer preference. So, how do you think about how to serve customers, and how can you think of the implications in a simpler sense without getting embroiled in the technical detail so that strategically, at least, you can create a vision for what you want to be (and test it with some of your most valuable customers or prospects)?
Think of the ‘old times’.
If you were a shop on the high street then what sort of shop would you be?
- Would you be a shop with an open door?
- Would you greet customers as they came in?
- Would your customers need assistance in choosing the product or service that met their needs, or are they buying something they already understand well?
- After they walk out of the door, would you offer to keep in touch with them to help them get the most out of their purchase?
- Would you close your doors at 5pm and open at 9am, with an hour for lunch?
- Would you offer a personal service with tailored pricing or would everything be priced the same?
- Would your customers be able to go up the street to another shop and compare prices?
- What would your prospective customers be saying to other people before they buy? Where would they congregate and would it be useful for you to be a part of that community (potentially the village pub!)
Once you know what type of shop you are, and what type of shop you want to be, then you can think about how this applies to both your physical stores and your internet store. You can go further and specifically look at customer journeys, but the value is in first understanding the type of shop that your customers want you to be and making sure that everyone in your organisation understands this and subscribes to the vision.
Then you can talk about how you need to staff the store, and how to delight the customers.
Choose an experience 