Archive for the 'customer experience design' Category
Posted by: Peter Massey | 16.08.2007
So what about designing customer experiences from non-retail angle in New York?
Food and drink – well there’s not a lot really that isn’t obvious:
- Have a greeter who’s there and so you don’t stand around wondering whether anyone wants your custom
- The waiter(ess) comes straight over and takes a drinks order so you know something’s happening
- There’s always enough staff to wave at if you need something
- Things always come quickly when you ask for them
Very simple stuff.
The basic economics must be different to have enough space, staff and training? More expensive so they charge more? – no.
Maybe it isn’t that staff are cheap, its that you go out of business if you don’t offer service. And of course the staff need the tips to live on
Its simply a different economic model
The “tip” is a bit like the customer scoring the agent after the call to give them their quality score.
It really matters if your bonus or recognition depends on it and you can’t accuse the customer of being wrong. You can also bet that if something is wrong with the system, the training or the policy, staff will shout louder & faster as it affects their “tip”.
Virtual tipping - now there’s a thought
customer experience design, tipping | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 12.08.2007
Wow, getting my holiday blogs out of sync here…..This one’s about getting as far as New York but I forgot to publish it!
Spending my Virgin airmiles to go to New York. This is meant to be a reward for spending shed loads of money - so much going to Australia that we got enough to do New York for free.
It didn’t feel like a reward. Too many Virgin basics aren’t working. Time for some redesign of the basic experience I think. Otherwise why would Virgin think I’d spend a fortune with Virgin, next time I go business class
Here’s a few examples of how my time was wasted and their brand damaged from this one trip:
1) You cant share Virgin miles with close relatives even if you paid for the flight they earned them on
2) You can’t book airmiles and non airmiles travellers together via the website. The extras on a miles ticket is half the cost of a real ticket - hmmmm, call me sceptical
3) It took 65 minutes to book the 3 tickets manually
4) By the time they’d been booked the price on the site moved - upwards of course
5) Despite escalation during the call and after the call, no one at Virgin would talk to me about the price of the ticket that changed mid booking
6)The booking reference, cut and pasted from the reminder email, wouldn’t work so we couldn’t get access to the site to give US visa information or change seats or check in, resulting in 3 calls
7)The nice people in the Indian call centre couldn’t take a passport number of 8 digits in less than three attempts
8)At check in there are still monster queues all the time - so no one is scheduling staff to meet demand. This is highly predicatble and very frustrating
9) We got to use a member card to get us into the short queue on the premium line. It had one agent and we waited forever anyway. The lady next to us in the queue said this happens to her every time.
10)She told the supervisory types - 3 of them. Not one went and opened a desk or said they’d do something about it for next time. They just made placatory remarks, which of course wind you up up at the third time of listening to ‘there are more people coming’ - and there clearly aren’t.
11) Having a huddle of 4 supervisors talk to each other is not the same as having 4 supervisors open 4 lines to shift the problem
12) Asking to sit further forward in the plane, not an upgrade, got us moved a bit with the usual line of “the flight is full”. When we got on the plane it was a lie. The bulkhead row in front was empty. Many rows were half full or empty.
13) But apart from that its just like most airlines: indifferent
I’d love to talk to anyone at Virgin who’d like to talk about saving shed loads of money on frustrated marketing, frustrated staff and frustrated customers: peter.massey@budd.uk.com
I offered feedback to the supervisor at the airport but he was too busy dealing with the problems……obviously
Virgin, Voice of the Customer, customer experience design | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 12.08.2007
Is blogging on holiday something only saddos do? Withdrawal symptom from email probably!!
Well the view over Central Park in NY is great, but this early in the day I cant be bothered to crawl out despite the quality of US TV driving me to despair. No the adverts haven’t improved. You know those ads with 15 seconds of healthy grandparents who lived to see their grandchildren and enjoy a healthy sex life from those drugs with 45 seconds of side effects including death, pain, agony, loss of digits, nausea, vomitting and headaches. Cars can evidently be sold in the US only if they come with aaaamaaazing discounts from men with daft voices. Subtle eh?
The quality of ads contrasts so much with the quality of retail in the sprawl of sunshine and skyscrapers we’ve come to visit. We are in a 13 year old’s idea of retail heaven - Big Apple, the other Apple, Abercombie, Old Navy and Dad’s credit card !
Let’s start with our first ventures around a couple of blocks from 59th and 5th - the corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue where FAO Schwarz and the Apple store contrast old and new retailing. FAO Schwatz ( http://www.fao.com/ ) has been around as a toy store since 1872 and represents all the traditional shopping you can muster with rows ofd stuff to look at. On the plus side there’s lots for the kids to interact with including a 10m keyboard they can jump around on and whch has featured in many films including A Christmas Story (1983). Someone from John Lewis once told me that one of their KPIs was that someone entering a shop should be greeted within one minute if they are to feel good about their visit. They even mystery shop to make sure its happening. Well Schwarz have always had a toy soldier at the door to greet you. Not subtle but it works.
The Apple Store on the other hand is probably the ultimate in designed shopping experiences. The approach is a hovering Apple logo in a glass box above street level. You know you’re in for something different.
There are greeters bantering with people entering and leaving and then your entrance is either by a glass lift inside the glass box or a glass spiral staircase. You get the picture. And then of course the “normal” for Apple, well lit, loads of circulation space, big tables, loads of demo kit, lots of savvy people to help every
which way you look.
A couple of contrasts with the London store though. The design idea of taking credit card buyers out from the queue doesn’t work because so few people in the US store use credit cards judging by the length of line and lack of success the guys asking were having.
Secondly the buzz around iPhones. Everyone wants to play with one. There were hundreds out there all working, set up with data and wifi to test and play with. Yes I can vouch for the fact it feels like an iPod, does the obvious stuff easily and sexily. Gotta get one. But there are 2 issues I didnt solve - texting seemed to be a small qwerty touchscreen. Yuk. And with a max of 8 gigabytes I couldn’t replace my iPod when its time is up. It’ll be interesting to see how O2 gets on selling it for Xmas in the UK. And what Vodafone come up with in response…
Still this place is a testament to the whole design- an-experience approach with rows of tills taking tons of money 24 hours a day (and DJ’d music events on Friday and Saturday night).
2 blocks down 5th Avenue is the flagship Abercrombie and Fitch store. Now this is really what Beth came for.
The greeters look like minor film stars; and there’s a greeter on every floor of course. Everyone looks like one of the dressed models in the abundant black and white photos to be seen in strategic places, on TV and on the billboards. They show the clothes like they’re meant to be. In fact a little digging on the website (http://www.abercrombie.com/) shows that they are called ‘cast’ and can apply to be in the photo shoots and films.
The set has been dressed and lit to show the clothes at their best. The lighting is theatrical, dark and different. The clothes are piled deep in every size so you are not going to struggle to find the one you want. And if you did some model would walk up to you and offer help.
And the sound system is straight from the best night club, played loud and louder (see http://www.meyersound.com/news/2006/abercrombie/ ). And you can get the soundtrack at the website. This a place that has been designed to be good. Needless to say the tills are clattering.
It was established in 1892 and has always been a bit different. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abercrombie_&_Fitch and see what made them a different store early last century.
Well the hour has reached something decent so its time for a NY breakfast…… more on food joints next time
Peter
Abercrombie and Fitch, Apple, customer experience design, retail | No Comments
