Minimum Level of Professionalism

Lately I have been focusing the successes of independents with ecommerce and it has been nothing short of phenomenal! Soon I will be announcing a major publishing agreement for my newest book — The Ecommerce Promise. I am beginning to believe that we are now living in the golden age of the independent. There is more money being made by independents because of ecommerce than in almost any other era. There are quiet success stories taking place across the country.

The reason for all of this success is because there are marketing tools available today that simply didn’t exist just a few years ago. We can create a Blog (a web log) in minutes with zero expense. You can create a web site tonight on GoDaddy, and be up and running for about $100 or less. Then you can go to Google AdWords to create traffic within minutes. The future rests with the creative!

Having said all of that, there are still some people who believe that you must spend lots of money for a web designer. Those days are over. We have all seen those web sites that have a lot of time-consuming (and expensive!) flash animation and music in the intro. And what is it that they all have in common? They have a button says something like, “click here to skip intro”. And most people do exactly that! All that stuff is a waste.

There is a new ecommerce term that is creeping into our vocabularies — the minimum level of professionalism. It means that once you have reached a certain standard, everything above that level brings only minimum returns. So what is the definition of a successful web site? One that works! Just look at a wildly successful yet simple web site like Blue Nile to prove the point. Blue Nile sells expensive diamonds on line, is only 7 years old, and is doing over $100 million in annual sales. Blue Nile personifies a breed of web sites that are basic, simple to understand, and highly successful. One lesson here is don’t waste money on unnecessary graphics that won’t make a difference.

My message this week is this: ask yourself what is the minimum level of professionalism that will take your business to where you it want to go? Do you know what the level is? Is your minimum high enough? Define your standards and you’ll know where you need to go. But whatever you do, don’t spend money and time that you don’t need to spend. Why waste it?

Why Do Customers Buy From You?

Most of my career has been devoted to exploring the reasons why people buy, and why they choose to buy from one business over another. What are their buying motivations? I believe that convenience is the top motivator. Convenience beats out price and quality everyday. But that’s not what this article is all about. It is about how so many retailers and business people think that customers are shopping with them for one reason, when in reality the customers are there for a totally different reason altogether. I like to call it mixed motivations.

How can that happen? Unfortunately, it is happening everyday. In seminars that I conduct for downtown & merchants groups (groups where the folks are reasonably acquainted with each another), I select one of the merchants and ask him or her why their best customers shop in their store? They will always include price, service and selection but when I ask the rest of the audience why they shop in that store, their answers are often completely different. It is a shocking experience. How can a business not know why customers shop with them?

As bad as this may be for a smaller business, it is almost inconceivable that a larger chain with all of their financial resources would ever allow this to happen. Yet, amazingly, it actually happens more with the large chains than Mom & Pop stores. And it happens for a very specific reason. Upper management has a preconceived idea of what the business was or should be. They are too far removed from real customer contact and surrounded by people who are trained to only agree with the boss. Thus, mixed motivations occur.

I was recently involved in a consulting project where a 300-store chain experienced sagging sales. My first question to management was why do your best customers buy from you? They said because they care about their customers and spend the time to give each and every one of them the expertise that the customers expect from us. That seemed a little silly, because if the store gets busy you just won’t be able to do that!

As I visited various stores in the chain, I rarely ever saw anyone sitting at the consultation desks at all. Yet they were spending millions to promote this concept on TV. I suggested a series of focus groups among store managers and key employees. We also did some one-on-one sessions along with market research studies. Expertise ranked number 9. Convenience was number 1. Yet this chain did nothing to address those issues. Again, mixed motivations.

The solution to this problem is simple. Just ask your customers. Don’t lead them or coach them — let them think about your questions and give you their honest answers. And don’t ask just a few customers. Ask as many customers as you can, from as many different walks of life as possible. Because once you know why they buy it makes it extremely easy to design your marketing and advertising efforts to provide what your customers really want. It’s simple, effective, powerful and profitable. And most retailers simply aren’t doing it.

Oh American Airlines … How Stupid Can You Be?

I wrote two very complimentary columns about the phenomenal customer service experience I had with American Airlines. For those of you who didn’t read them, I was greeted on the jetway and escorted to my next gate by electric cart just to say thanks for all of the business that I had given to American Airlines. I told everyone and it created the most wonderful word of mouth advertising. I then got criticized by some readers that only the fat cats who fly a lot get that type of service. So, shouldn’t your best customers be treated best? I defended American’s policy.

I have since learned that what American did was a strategy of targeted acts of kindness to high value customers in unannounced situations. I didn’t know it had a name but I love the concept and I thank the reader who turned me on to the formal name.

Well, let me tell you how all that goodwill was thrown out the window and teach all of us two very valuable lessons. Last Monday I was flying on American from Boston to San Francisco at 9:05 AM direct, then to Atlanta, and then back home to Boston on Wednesday night. Between a combination of sleeping a little late and extra heavy traffic I was running late and realized I might not be able to make my flight. So I called American on my special Executive Platinum phone number expecting they would rebook me on a little later flight.

They were more than willing to rebook me on the 2:00 PM flight for an additional $1,561 plus a $100 change fee. Considering I only paid $750 for the entire ticket, I thought it was, well, a little high. I was then informed that if I flew standby, there would be no added cost. That seemed like a pretty big spread, so I asked if there was something that would perhaps be in the middle. I was told no. And if I didn’t make the standby, I would have no other options. I asked if they could help me with any other airline options and the agent told me that United flew to San Francisco, but I would have to call them myself.

I called United from my traffic jam and they had a flight at 2:00 that they would confirm at $380. So I asked her to hold it. Then I called Jet Blue and they had a flight that left at 11:00 and flew to Oakland. The price was $366.

I called American back and informed them that I would be flying Jet Blue and to cancel the front end of my reservation but I would using the rest of my itinerary. I was then informed that the ticket would have to be repriced because I wasn’t using the coast-to-coast portion. I figured that I was going to get a discount or something. The ticket agent then informed me that she needed my credit card information to charge the new fare. When I asked how much, I was told it would be an additional $496 plus a $100 change fee. I said I wasn’t changing anything that I was just not flying the first leg. I didn’t agree to the charge and called Delta Airlines to ask if they had any flights to Atlanta. To make a long story shorter, I booked the balance of the trip on Delta for $630. I then cancelled my American ticket and have a credit which I will use in the future.

I had to pay an extra $200+ for my error but I also got a direct flight from San Francisco and one from Atlanta. I saved about 4 hours of travel time.

The two morals of the story: Before you dig your heels in about a price, make sure you do a little comparison shopping. See what your competition is charging. Because if you don’t, you could have egg on your face and make a very good customer feel like they were getting ripped off. Not a good thing for any customer.

The other lesson is about how fragile our customer relationships really are — even with our good customers. Sometimes they are just one bad experience away from leaving and never returning. They have become that way because of the power of choice the consumer has today. Our customers don’t have to accept poor service — there are other companies lined up that want their business. I won’t leave American Airlines because of this experience, but they have lost my complete and unquestioned loyalty. They opened the door and allowed me to experience the way their competition treated me. Are you willing to do that? We are all but one bad experience away from losing a customer. Never take a customer for granted unless you want to wipe out the benefits you’ve accrued from targeted acts of kindness to high value customers in unannounced situations. Too bad — it was an opportunity to excel but instead it became an opportunity lost.

It’s Time for Reality Retailing

When was the last time your store had a contest or a competition? No, no — it’s not about having a drawing for a free trip to Aruba. Those contests never work anyway. Besides, when you give away that kind of prize, it usually ends up going to someone that no one even knows or someone who may never have bought anything in the store!

Let’s steal an idea from the current fad on TV. Let’s get people involved. Let’s get people talking about your store. Isn’t that the purpose of advertising?

I have always believed that if you want word of mouth advertising, then you must give them something to talk about. Doing what everyone else does isn’t what everyone talks about. Please don’t give me the line, “Oh, we have great service! That’s what people talk about”. Sorry, when was the last time you gave great service to a customer only to have them show you the piece they bought in the islands?

We are living in the most competitive society of all time. We have more sports and competition than Antwerp has diamonds. Are you in the retail business or are you in the memory business? It’s now time to make your promotions memorable. When was the last time you planned a promotion that included — an deserved — a press release because the promotion was newsworthy?

For example, if you owned a jewelry store, what would be wrong with a competition about the most romantic way a man asked his girlfriend to marry him? Or how about the most unusual or funniest story of the best man misplacing the wedding ring before the ceremony, and what was used in place of the ring at the ceremony? How about a contest about why a particular piece of jewelry is a customer’s personal treasure? If you really wanted to get provocative, then ask the question “What would it mean to you (or what would you do) to get the ring you always wanted?”

To focus on a different approach, why not ask what it means to a man to buy that special ring or gift. I can just imagine all those soft, touchy, tender letters that provokes every woman (and most men, even if they won’t admit to it) to say, “Oh, that’s so nice.” Wouldn’t you want your store to be associated with that type of promotion? Absolutely! Instead of selling symbols of love; you would be showing the love.

A few years ago I did a program for Daniel’s Jewelers in San Diego, a wonderful chain of over 40 stores. They were celebrating their 50th anniversary and did a simple promotion where they asked their customers what Daniel’s, or a Daniel’s purchase, meant to them. The responses that customers wrote were nothing short of spectacular. Before I prepared my talk I read a huge stack of these customer responses and was mesmerized by the comments. Trying to pick the stories to use in my presentation was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Daniel’s had created an emotional attachment to their customers that simply cannot be easily duplicated. Not only did it have a dramatic effect on their customers, but also every employee who heard those stories never felt the same way again about the place where they worked.

No, unlike reality TV, the competition is not about surviving in a retail store, jumping from an airplane with a ring in your mouth, or having spiders crawl all over your merchandise. But it’s as real as life and love and that’s what people love to talk about the most. So it’s time to get in touch with your customers, think out of the box, and it’s time to get real!

Become An Expectation Controller... It’s all about controlling expectations

I have become convinced that the core of customer service and marketing problems, and success in these areas, lie in meeting, exceeding, or falling short of customers' expectations. Why is it that something that is so simple to understand becomes so difficult for people to execute?

I really experienced this phenomenon during the past week when I was with my sister in Florida as she went through the final stages of having a house built and passing papers on it. There is a lesson in her experience that is all about expectations.

My sister bought a house from a developer 15 months ago. She picked all of the upgrades but never saw the progress of the house being built because she lives in Connecticut. She had to go to a buyer's walk-through 5 days before closing on the house to make sure that everything was finished to her satisfaction. She expected to find a number of faux pas which is common in building a new house. That is exactly what she was told when she signed her purchases and sale agreement but they told her not to worry because they had a crew just to make all the necessary adjustments in one week. She was well prepared.

I attended the walk-through and was amazed and delighted at how well everything had come out. We were very free with our praise for the company for a great job. There were about 18 little things to be done before the passing but we were assured that they were minor and would easily be finished within a couple of days. She had to attend an additional walk-through the day of the passing just to make sure the final touch ups and appropriate cleaning was completed. She was confident that everything would be done on time and done well.

It was amazing how her joy and praise of the company turned to distrust and dislike when she returned for the final inspection. Out of the list of 18 items, only one was completed and she was told that the rest would be done by within a couple of days or a "week or so". after closing on purchase of the house. The natural thing to do would be to just hold money back and put it in escrow until everything would be completed. The problem was that the dollar amount wasn't that much. Getting everything done was the important thing.

What happened was all about her expectations. She was properly prepared for the first walk through. The company under promised and we were thrilled with "only" 18 items to fix. How do you think we would have felt if we were told that there should only have 3 or 4 issues? We would have been disappointed with the same situation.

Our expectations were that the issues were minor to them and they would be "no problem". Therefore, our expectations were exceptionally high and we believed that everything would be completed very quickly. If our expectations had been different and we were instead told that everything would be done within a month and we had received a hot line to call on the progress of the corrections, then the company could have met or even exceeded our expectations.

The interesting part about this scenario was that the Sales Department created the right expectation when the property was sold. It was the Customer Service Department that created the expectations that could only be reached with complete perfection where anything less would be a disappointment.
When you advertise, are you creating expectations that are too high? Are you leaving room to WOW your customers by exceeding their expectations or are you telling everyone how great you are, only to let down later?

The bigger question that we must all ask is what do our customers and clients expect from us? How can we exceed it? Why do our existing customers return to our businesses and what can we do to push the bar and create the unexpected for them?

Expectations can be the root cause of so many problems in business and in life. Many times we don't know what happened to a relationship because rarely will people say, "you didn't meet my expectations". They just avoid the truth with some hollow lie. (Special people will tell you in a positive way and these are the people who always seem to develop exceptional relationships. But this is a business column, not the love line, so enough of the "touchy/feely stuff".)

One last word of advice. Meeting our customers' expectations will keep them coming back. But exceeding them will get our customers talking about our businesses and have them tell their friends and so on and so. Who said you can't control word of mouth advertising?