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Brand Seppuku (a customer experience primer)
By bear | December 15, 2009
One of the great lessons from the boom in online retail is that the customer experience is everything. Make the discovery and purchase process as easy as it can be, and you will leap-frog your competitors.
Recently I’ve had to shop across Bridal Registries for friends’ weddings. The first one could be done online at Peters of Kensington. I logged on, entered the registry number, viewed the pre-selected items online, chose and paid for my selection, which would then be delivered to the happy couple. In all, it took me a fraction less than 10 minutes from start to finish, and all from the comfort of my living room – brilliant.
The second registry was held by Myer, with no discernable online address. I decided to duck into their store, with my two toddler daughters in tow, to get the gift selection out of the way. To sum up the experience, here is a list of what happened.
1. Couldn’t find the Bridal Registry desk in the store. Two sales assistants when asked did not know where it was.
2. The Bridal Registry desk when found is un-staffed, so I have to check with a service desk nearby on how to access the registry list.
3. Was told by a service staff member, rather rudely, that they were too busy to leave the tills because Myer wouldn’t put enough staff on, and that I would have to wait until all the paying customers were finished.
4. When eventually they checked the Registry, and once the list of the gifts was printed, I was told I’d have to go and find the items on the shop floor, and that the staff were too busy to help.
5. Armed with a couple of target SKUs (the descriptions were next to useless), I begin to search for items on the list (now with two very grumpy toddlers). At one point I had to sit on the floor to go through piles of products looking for barcodes and SKUs, and after looking for more than 8 different gifts without success, went looking for the largest list object I could find (in the hope that size would make it easier to find). Whilst this was going on, another customer buying a gift for a wedding asked the sales staff for help to find items on her registry list. She was yelled at by a staff member, saying “We’re too busy to help, if you can’t find an item from the list we’ve sold out, try something else.”. Horrific.
6. When I finally found an object, I was told I’d have to purchase it and take it myself, as delivery wasn’t offered a week out from the wedding.
7. At the end of the purchase, I was advised by the sales desk staff where I purchased the item, to go back to the first desk (by now with 20 people queued up) to “let them know to take the purchased item off the list”.
What I’d hoped would be a 15 minute transaction had turned into 90 minutes of retail hell, punctuated by the frustrated cries of my children. It simply could not have been worse. Keeping in mind a bridal registry is a list of pre-selected gifts, the fact that an online option isn’t offered is ridiculous in these times of widespread online shopping. The experience was long, difficult, and frankly painful.
In terms of brand damage, this exercise had the following effects. Firstly a number of customers in the vicinity of this episode had seen first-hand the disgraceful attitudes of the Myer sales staff, damaging their perception of the overall Myer brand. For myself and the other customer shopping for the registry, the experience has severley reduced our LTV, or lifetime value. Whereby Myer is a household department store name, shopped at throughout a consumers life, for me it is now no longer on my list of appropriate business’ to shop at.
In the modern world of e-commerce the big department stores in Australia have struggled to come to terms with the online concept. There is the arguement that the sheer volume of SKUs and lack of tactile discovery would limit the success of e-commerce, but there are simply too many successes (think Amazon and Ebay for starters) for these arguements to hold truth.
For the old behemoths like Myer, they are going to have to adapt to the changing demands of consumers or face a limited future. They no longer function in a market with limited supply options for consumers, and can not afford the arrogance of times past. Staffing levels need to be appropriate, staff need to be trained to be consumer-centric, and product discovery needs to be offered in ways that consumers want. If they don’t adapt, they may as well prepare to fall on their own sword.
Topics: Marketeer Babble, Techno-Consumerism | No Comments »