How to kill great customer experience

Penny wise while spending on marketing, pound foolish with customer experience

A few days ago, I went to the market looking for a blazer (a suit jacket) to don during meetings. Pledging not to be influenced by messaging from any of the competing brands, my focus was to land a good quality jacket, irrespective of their positioning. My evaluation criteria’s were; the material, fit, buttons and lapel, and cost. As I recall my experience, I thought of penning it down. This covers the what. Now, why am I writing? I want to share my experience and important lessons (Kill) that I think all marketers (product especially) can learn from. Being a marketer myself, I think I am at a vantage point as I can now relate to the problems customers usually face during their buying journey.

1. Buying an experience

Let me make it simple. I am buying an experience that you should able to translate into a product, here a jacket. Therefore, when I say I need a blazer, what I am really saying is that I need to experience subtle style and premium quality (which is still in my mind, disconnected from your brand). What you are to ask is, what you have in your mind. The answer to this should bring out “subtle style and premium quality”. If not, probe more. If you have profiled me well, you can figure out that I am here to buy and buy premium if I have to, to satiate my desire to look slick.

Kill: When I say I want to buy a blazer, you start throwing clothes at me. Moreover, when I say, I am not looking at these types, you show more. Not caring to ask relevant questions or probing. Throwing numbers early on will put me off as you missed “premium” from my expectations.

2. The buying process

At this stage, you should have applied the filter and clear away all potential buys that I would have never made. This should help shorten time to closure, focus on select items and help me categorise products based on the material, fit, buttons and lapel, and cost, which only helps you make a sale. Next up for me then is to look at the closed-group of items. As a customer, I would like to see not more than 3 – 5 items on your list. Too many, it will confuse me; too few, it will walk me to the next shop (and repeat). Now, there could be many criteria’s that your customers will consider while buying. But given the research you undertook before launching, you should know them all. The need is now for you to ask what are you looking for in your product / what will help you make a decision to buy one item over another. Once you know the answer to that, you can be certain that I will buy 1 of 2 jackets that you have on the list of 5. Now it’s upon you to ‘sell me the experience’. Invite me to try them on.

Kill: Not creating a select list of 3 – 5 items in your mind and picking those from the stock to display. Not “inviting” me to try them on shows your interest to skip past my most important experience of pre-owning a product. It could be that I like a jacket but it does not fit me. You not having my size, is no excuse though. Not offering to inform me when it will be available and adding free home delivery / tailoring it for me / hemming it for free are early signs suggesting you are tapping out of closing a potential deal.

3. Price point

As a customer, I am not in for the maximum spend. I will balance out cost and quality. I will use my past experience, research, word-of-mouth, etc. to get me to rank first 2 (or 3 to be safe). Quality does not always come at a cost. Innovative ways have been discovered to cut cost keeping quality quotient high. Now the game that is being played out is; who has put innovation to work. One can make out where you cut corners to keep your production costs low while keeping your profit margins intact. Now, this is where you really “impact” my understanding of your “brand”. All that fancy marketing rumbling will come to test. Remember; Marketing and Innovation should go hand-in-hand.

Kill: Not trying to read my mind when I am ranking these items. Once you aggregate all the pointers from the previous two stages, you can see that I have already narrowed down on only 2. Pausing too long for me to come back to you is not as bad as continuous monologuing. Another very important aspect is to not respect the buyers ego. So, don’t give me a look when I say I don’t think this is priced well. This is what no market research can ever discover, customer response. Not selling me an offer or a discount before I almost give up / in tells me you are standing there only to make a cut on this deal. That you don’t care.

4. Extra, extra

We all have been there. We all want more from our purchase. Complementing the suit with spare buttons or a brush or hanger or a cover bag will communicate greater value. The quality of these accessories will affect the position of the brand in my mind though.

Kill: Missing spare buttons (usually stitched along the inside of the jacket) or the cover bag without a carry handle or a hanger that gives up in a week are bad signals. We are at the summit, hopefully with a positive feel to it, and throwing your customer down the cliff is a mistake you dare not commit. Buyer remorse may kick in if the customer was dependent on them. No availability of customer service in case something goes awfully wrong after the first clean cycle is a sure kill. With this, you finally killed the brand!

In my case, I have experienced all points I mentioned above in one way or another while making purchases in the past. A cheap quality hanger inspired me to write though. I had a great experience until the hanger gave up in a week. So, a premium jacket got a low-quality hanger for a partner. I had to spend a couple more to be able to hang the jacket straight.

Now that I think of it, there are many examples like these. Some at the top of my mind; non-perforated toilet paper roll, halfway sliced bread, furniture with metal base(the ones that make a screeching noise). They stop right before the total experience loop closes. Incomplete.

Summing this up;

The total positive / negative customer experience in this case = (Buying Experience + Buying Process + Price Point + Extra) – (sum of all ‘Kills’)

So what Kate Zabriskie, a well-known trainer and a corporate consultant, says is spot-on:

Now as a marketer, you can work this in the reverse order to better understand your brand and recall value. What other experiences you had during your journey as a buyer? Do you think there are more examples where you did not get a positive experience?

Please write to me.