Will Brick-and-Mortar retailers ban the iPhone (and other mobile phones)?

Checkout Smartshop and other similar mobile price comparison software might soon be on the list of most-hated technologies of brick-and-mortar retailers. Price comparison for shoppers has become a lot easier through different online services yet most traditional brick-and-mortar retailers avoid these platforms since they cannot match the competitive prices on the Internet due to different, higher costs in their their retail stores.

Luckily for these retailers their customers so far had no chance to check prices for the products offered immediately in the store. Customers interested in price comparisons had to do it manually after their visit to the retailer at their PC at home.

Along came the iPhone (as well as other mobile phones) and an application call Checkout Smartshop that allows instant price comparison and online order or products that you just see standing in front of you in whatever retail store you are.

Checkout Smart Shop is an easy way to find prices (local and online), reviews, and local information for a product. Here is how it works:

1. Enter a barcode (UPC) number (faster than typing in a product description on the web!)
2. Now you’re searching!  Checkout automatically starts by bringing you to product reviews so you can see what other people liked about the product you’re looking at.  Checkout also automatically filters out the less useful reviews so you see things other people thought were good to know (don’t worry, the rest of the reviews are just a click away if you want to see them).  By default you see review summaries so you can tell at a glance what people thought, but full reviews are also just a touch away.  Note that even after you come to the reviews screen Checkout will continue to look for and load reviews.



3. If you want to look beyond reviews, you can look at either local or online prices.  For either category you can see the price listed, and choose to visit the web site if you like.

The challenge is that this is another building block to bring online experiences into traditional offline environments through the use of mobile computing. Retailers will be confronted with a lot of questions.

What are the consequences for shoppers? How will it change impulse shopping behavior? Does the knowledge of other prices redirect impulse shopping behavior from the location where it was triggered (the brick-and-mortar store) to the online store?

Do we see a new generation of shoppers that see brick-and-mortar shops only as an outlet to experience the product but the purchase is made online right in the store where the cheapest offer can be found?

What does this mean for retailers? Should retailers fight these mobile applications and try to focus on keeping the existing business model?

Or should the focus shift towards creating a truly extraordinary shopping experience, redesigning the supply chain and through this ensuring maybe not the cheapest, but probably competitive prices.

Strategies and Tactics for Successful Service Recovery

It is easy to focus on creating always better and more differentiated products and services when designing for remarkable customer experiences. Maybe it is simply human, that we tend to not look at situations when a product or service fails (think positive!) your customer’s loyalty will be negatively impacted.

I see a huge opportunity for improvement and a chance to create remarkable experiences that create word-of-mouth marketing in situations when products and services fails – if sophisticated service recovery programs are in place.

Can you imagine one of your customers telling a friend:

"You know, the product (or service) of company XYZ broke down the other day. But when I contacted the company, they did everything possible to solve the problem in a fast and friendly manner and now it is fixed. I understand problems can happen, but I feel that this company is taking care of me."

Every service (human or technology driven) as well as product will eventually fail one day and put your customer in a uncomfortable situation. Smart organizations will understand this and develop a service recovery program which ensures that their customers are satisfied even after things have gone wrong.

When organizations plan to implement recovery programs it is helpful to differentiate between (1) the strategic initiatives that should be in place before the actual problem occurs and (2) the tactical activities that should happen after a problem has occurred and the customer contacted the company.

Let’s start with the strategic initiatives that will ensure that the right environment for remarkable service recovery is in place.

Anticipate the needs for recovery

Whenever you roll out a product or service, the people related with it are probably well aware of potential problems or obstacles that might occur. It is probably not so much arrogance than probably more wishful thinking that limits the ability of companies to foresee potential problems with a product. Accepting that even the best designed product or service will fail one day in specific situations is the first step. Anticipating potential problems will help organizations to be prepared when the first customer contacts the company with a problem.

Build an organization that is fast in decision making, and fast to response.

One of the key success factors to win back customers and restore their satisfaction is to act fast. While your front-line employees might be working hard (and fast) already, the whole organization that deals with service recovery has to be “designed for agility”. This includes clear escalation and decision-making processes. One key principle should be that the fastest decision-making happens when the front-line employee can make the decision. So the real goal is not to define better escalation processes, but to define processes that empower employees so that escalation processes are not necessary anymore.

Empower front-line employees

In most companies, the employees that are actually interacting with customers are the ones that receive the lowest salary in an organization. While increasing the salaries (compared to other competitors) is one way to attract and retain talent that is able to deliver exceptional service, empowering employees and giving them the freedom to do whatever is necessary to ensure that customers are satisfied is probably even more economically meaningful.

Train employees

Ensure that your training program includes not just lessons on delivering service when everything works out as planned but also to include lessons that teach employees to improvise or to set recovery programs into action if something goes wrong.

While these strategic initiatives are important to define the long-term direction of your service recovery programs, the "moment of truth" happens when a customer contacts a company and interacts with an employee to discuss the problem and possible solutions.

In these moments the following seven rules should be applied by employees that are actually interacting with your customers:

1. Acknowledgement

Acknowledge that there is a problem. It doesn’t matter whether the customer didn’t understand certain aspects that are obvious from an organization’s perspective. He is the one that has a problem and if you want to keep this customer he needs to be taken serious. If one tries to convince customers that there is no problem, you are actually telling them they are stupid. This applies also to situations when the customer is following the wrong steps to perform a task – never blame the customer.

2. Empathy

Understand the problem from a customer’s point of view and also understand that he might be upset after a problem has occurred. While it is not necessary to listen to a customer when he starts cursing at employees, front-line employees should try to create an atmosphere that supports and enables a positive solution of a problem. Confronting the customer with his anger and frustration will not lead to an escalation of the problem, communicating that one can understand his situation will.

3. Apology

Saying sorry in the name of the company occurred is essential. Whether the employee should apologize in his name or in the name of his company depends on the context of the service recovery. If the employee (or a direct colleague) was involved when the problem occurred, he should apologize for himself. If the employee is in a call-center and a problem happened at a completely different location in the organization, he should apologize in the name of the organization – everything else is not authentic.

4. Own the problem

Taking ownership of the problem by the employee that is confronted with the problem (no matter in what position he is in) ensures that customers feel that they are taken care of. And even if your job is not to resolve the problem ultimately, telling customers to go somewhere else (and not "bringing" them there) sends the message that they don’t care.

5. Fix The Problem

Obviously fixing or at leasing trying to fix the problem for the customer should be the top priority. This might be easy in some situations (maybe just replacing the defect product) it becomes a challenge when the problem is not a real problem. Let’s say the customer was simply using the product in a wrong way, fixing the problem in such a situation means re-educating the customer so that he uses the product or service in the supposed way.

6. Provide assurance

When Customers get in touch with you to report a problem and to demand a fix their most important need is to be taken serious. Giving them a feeling of assurance that the problem will be sorted out and should (hopefully) not occur again will leave a professional impression and help rebuild the customer’s confidence a company’s products and services.

7. Provide compensation

If you want to make angry customers happy, give them money. Providing a refund, token or other compensation depending on the severity of the problem remains to be a powerful method for service recovery. Increasing the amount of money that a company pays to company to fix problems requires a rigorous control but it can indeed ensure that your customers are satisfied. It is important to note that just "handing out money" is not enough – if money is handed out unfriendly or even worse, in a tedious discussion with the customers, satisfaction will not be restored.

References:

Hart, C.W.L.; Heskett, J.L.; Sasser, W.E.: The profitable act of service recovery. Harvard Business Review 68 (4), 1990, pp, 148–156

Johnston, R.; Michel, S.: Three outcomes of service recovery: Customer recovery, process recovery and employee recovery, International Journal of Operations & Production Management 28 (4), 2008, pp. 79 – 99

7 Improvements for Google Maps Mobile that will make it the first Mobile Killer Application

Recently I have been traveling quite a lot, mostly to locations where I haven’t been before. Since I use a BlackBerry Curve with GPS and Google Maps Mobile (GMM) as my main mobile phone, I thought that my mobile companion can definitely help me answer a lot of questions while on the road. I was wrong.

Let’s recap a few situations:

I was in the city center of Brussels and wondering where I could find something to eat. Unfortunately most of the shops were already closed and I didn’t want to go to a restaurant. So I started Google Maps, searched for “McDonalds” and “Subways” and basically the results where mediocre: I found out where the McDonalds Headquarter is in Belgium (some 20 km outside Brussels), I guess there might be a Subway’s restaurant but it was out of walking distance and I was not willing to study public transportation – so at the end I asked around for the next train station and found a small shop there.

Similar situations happened in Milan and Istanbul – even in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, I was trying to use Google Maps Mobile to help me find a dedicated Puma Store. When I finally arrived at the mall it was merely a little Puma shop with a few of the most common shoes – not exactly what I have been looking for (I was looking for the Puma Black Label series of shoes….but that’s a different story).

Overall my impression was that there is a huge potential for Google Maps Mobile and location based services when you are traveling or in locations that you don’t know that well. The only problem: Google Maps Mobile is simply not ready for primetime yet.

I have summarized the areas for improvement in the list and I am the first to upgrade when Google implements a few of these requests:

1. Include a pedestrian mode
   Not everyone is using GPS in a car – I guess that most users of Google Maps Mobile use it for navigation outside their car when they are walking or cycling. If you need GPS navigation regularly in a car I suppose most people would buy a dedicated GPS car navigation system. I want to have the ability to switch to a “pedestrian mode” where the routing is based on each “walkable” street, not just on “drivable” streets as in a car mode. Help me find the shortest way in a city, and not the way next to the main roads.
2. Include support for the most common human activities
   We humans tend to follow the same patterns and we usually perform quite similar activities to reach certain outcomes. There are different situations when we are looking for restaurants, a small shop, a big supermarket, a fast food restaurant, a coffee shop or a toilet. I could imagine a menu with options that resemble common activities and include Eat, Drink, Sleep, Shop, See/Discover. The submenu for Eat would be “Fast Food”, “Average Restaurant”, “Exclusive Restaurant” – and Google Maps provides suggestions based on my current location.
3. A location based search for actual products and services
   When I was in Milan, I was not searching for a restaurant itself, I was searching for typical, traditional Italian pasta; same in California, I was looking for a shop that sells the Puma Black Label series of shoes and wouldn’t mind if I can find them in a store that is not a Puma store. So besides supporting certain activities that most humans perform regularly, location based search should also help me find the location of certain products – whether it is helping me find a certain pair of shoes or a restaurant that sells a certain kind of pasta. While the quality of the search results depends largely on the amount of data that is integrated, the first step might be to integrate Google Product Search into Google Maps.
4. Turn Google Maps Mobile into a travel companion
   Since the biggest use of Google Maps Mobile can be expected from people who are traveling (business and personal) Google Maps Mobile should be able to store all the relevant information for my trip (hotels, meeting points, maybe even appointment schedules – combined with Google Calendar) and be my travel companion that has all information available for me. I prepare it in advance (maybe by mailing it to a dedicated email address) and when I am on the road, I just push next, next, next.
5. Solve the language problem
   When I was in Brussels, I tried to search for the Flemish Parliament, the venue for a workshop that I planned to attend. Unfortunately Google Maps couldn’t help me because the Flemish Parliament can only be found with the correct Dutch term which is “Vlaams Parlement” – unfortunately I haven’t included that word in my Dutch vocabulary before. Even the search for “trainstation, St. Gallen, Switzerland” (my current residence) doesn’t return the expected results, only the search “Bahnhof, St. Gallen, Schweiz” returns the correct address. I understand that it is impossible to incorporate a complete dictionary but at least the most common search terms and locations should be multi-language capable.
6. Include public transportation
   If you are not familiar with the public transportation system in a city you have two choices: (1) spend a lot of time trying to figure out what could be the right mode of transportation or (2) spend a lot of money on taxis. Google Maps Mobile should help me find the right choice of public transportation – not just from one station to the other but from my place of departure to the place of arrival.
7. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate
   The quality of Google Maps Mobile (as well as Google Maps) depends fundamentally on the amount of integrated data. A search for restaurants can only generate useful results, when a sufficient number of restaurants are stored in the database. Otherwise it is still better to “open your eyes and look around”. While most McDonalds restaurants can be found through Google Maps in Switzerland, the data was still missing in Belgium.

These improvements – if adequately implemented – could render tremendously useful application for everyone who is traveling regularly. The integration of Google Maps into the iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile phones creates a huge user base that could tap into these services. Yet as long as the quality and utility from Google Maps Mobile is still not better than that of “looking and asking around” we won’t see large adoption.

Does this only apply to Google Maps? Not necessarily – the company that is able to provide this functionality combined with a sufficiently large user base will become the leader for location based services.

The picture that is shown with this post is currently uncredited because I couldn’t track back the source. If you know the source of this picture, please drop me an email.

Who is your customer? – Understanding the different roles of customers

Delivering differentiated services that lead to remarkable experiences requires a thorough understanding of your customers. While this is a highly complex task that requires an analysis from different perspectives some patterns can help to identify these potential areas. The following is such a pattern that can be used to better understand the roles of your customers.

The initial question is: Who is your customer?. This is not always obvious since there are many actors involved in the purchase and use of a certain product or service. Yet five main roles can be identified that exist in many purchasing situations. Often several, sometimes all of these roles might be conducted by the same individual but recognizing the needs and requirements of each separately leads to potential areas for service design.

The following figure shows the most common roles that customers represent.

Here is a short description of the single roles:

• Initiator: The individual who initiates the search for a solution to the customer’s problem.
• Influencer: Individuals who have some influence on the purchase decision.
• Decider: Taking into consideration the views of the initiator and influencer some individual will make the decision as to which product or service should be purchased.
• Purchaser: The individual who is actually paying for the product or service
• User: The individual who finally consumes the product or service

It is important to understand that in any buying situation various actors can and will influence the buying decision and they will also be – either active or passive – experiencing a product and service and should therefore be considered when designing the overall “brand experience”. If different individuals undertake these roles, it is necessary to develop individual and differentiated services to satisfy the different needs and requirements.

The standard example for this is a visit to a theme park with children. The initiator might be the child that saw an advertising on TV, while the decider and purchaser are the parents. While it is important to design a great experience for children at a theme park, it might be even more important to focus on the experience of parents because ultimately they will decide and pay for the next trip to Disneyland.

The different roles become even more apparent in a business-to-business context. One classic example is the Hilti Fleet Management. Hilti offers differentiated services for the purchaser of the drilling machines and does not focus solely on the user of the drilling machines.

We’ll manage your tools so you can manage your business.
For a fixed monthly fee, Hilti provides you with a new fleet of tools.
During the usage time, there is only one monthly invoice for all your tools that covers absolutely all costs (including repair). Plus — at the end of the usage period — your fleet will be renewed with the latest generation of Hilti tools. Based on your needs, you select the type and quantity of tools.

Your benefits from Hilti Tool Fleet Management:
Full transparency & reliability

• Instant access to your complete tool inventory
• Easy accounting and cost allocation
• All tools labeled with your company logo plus inventory code / job reference possible.
• Exclusive Internet portal to track your tool fleet, order tools and consumables and arrange tool repair pick-ups

Applying this simple pattern can help identify areas for innovative products and services which in the end contribute to a remarkable customer experience.

Google’s User Experience Principles

Whenever you are working in a large team towards a common goal it is difficult to ensure that all team members are moving in the right direction. Defining a vision (I personally prefer the term "intent") helps a team to stay on track by guiding and supporting the decision making process.

Google’s User Experience Principles are one of these tools that help design teams stay on track and they reflect how most of us expect to experience Google’s services.

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

The ten principles that drive design decisions and contribute to a "Google User Experience" are:

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

While are the first glance these principles still seem very high level, my impression is that they are valuable because the primary objective of these principles is not to design new user experiences but to facilitate decision making – decisions between different design and implementation alternatives.

But here is what I don’t understand:

Why Google would post them on their website?  Are these guidelines just an "explanation" and "justification" of "Google’s User Experience"?

Do they help to educate user what a "Googley" user experience is and influence their expectations of Google’s products?

How does it affect you when you read "Every millisecond counts" but the performance of your Google Reader is slow? Will it make you think that "at least they tried" and positively impact your user experience?