crboynton’s blog

This post is about how businesses today need to think hard about their customer experiences, before, during and after the sale. It’s based on a not so positive recent experience I had.

Recently, while shopping for a Halloween costume for my 3 year old son, we made a special stop at one of those seasonal Halloween specialty stores that seemingly appear overnight in empty mall/strip mall retail space. Excited by the idea of getting this annual task out of the way early in October, and finding a great costume, we walked briskly from parking lot to store, which was a massive retail space formerly the home of CompUSA.

Entering the first set of double doors we were greeted by a life-size Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy in a dark and cob- webbed environment. This was a great start to the shoping experience! My son was relishing the sight of the spooky creatures.

Then it happened. As we walked up to and through the second set of double doors and set foot in the store proper, we came face to face with a 8-10 year old girl sitting at table with green cash box offering tchochky type prizes in exchange for a charitable donation. Granted the store shared a common entrance and exit, but without hesitation, as we entered, the litte girl delivered the pitch, stopping us dead in our tracks. Feeling just slightly put on the spot (understatement of course), :30 later we had $5 less in our pockets and still hadn’t made it 10 feet into the store. Strike one.

We then made it into the front of the store where a cashier, near a very cool crawling/grunting Frankenstein with lit eyes, gave us a chilly reception. We didn’t mind because we were more focused on the entertainment value of that crawling Frankenstein with the glowing eyes. My son, wife nor myself had seen nothing like it before. We were all so enamored with this $100 porch decoration, I wanted to immortalize it with a quick pic so I could share it with friends. Re-
enter the cashier, now telling me that I can’t take a picture of the creature due to corporate policy. OK, I get that I can’t walk around retail stores snapping pics for competitive reasons, but with my wife and son laughing and giggling at this creature, this was far from an intelligence gathering exercise. In fact it was obvious that this would be a picture equivalent in intent to one you’d take on vacation. Strike two.

At that point, even though my wife continued to look for costumes, I was mentally checked out of the shopping experience. Now she may disagree, but in my mind after the charity ambush and cashier repromanding, there was no way any of my hard earned dollars would be spent at this place. My POV on this is driven in part by the bad customer experience and in part by management incompetence.

Before you draw the wrong conclusion here that I’m being unreasonable, let me elaborate on my thought process a bit more. If I am a brick and mortar retailer, I may spend 5-10% or more of my annual revenue running advertising/marketing programs designed to engage and attract customers to my store. Trying to create and deliver a message that resonates and catalyzes a desire for that person to get in their car and head over to my store is certainly a challenge, but hey, that’s marketing. So, when all my efforts pay off and someone actually takes the time to head over to my store, why would I do ANYTHING that jeopardizes the fragile buying state of mind? Retailers should figuratively be rolling out the red carpets customers walk into their stores. And while allowing a charity to set up a table in front of your store is a very noble action, if my primary objective is to sell Halloween costumes, I should not let a charity pitch come before the customer had the opportunity to browse my store. Since this store shared a common entrance and exit, a simple directive to the volunteer to not pitch people just walking in, but rather exiting, would be a much smarter play that would help to preserve the customer desire to shop. And in terms of the hand slapping i received for trying to snap a pic, I think empowering employees to use discretion and judgement is also a much smarter move. Great service brands live by the mantra “the customer is always right”. It would have been very easy for the cashier to evaluate the situation and conclude that I am not a competitive risk. I’m not walking the aisles snapping photos of products and price tags, I’m just enjoying a fun moment that this retail store created with my family. In fact, had she let me take the pic I would have shared it with friends on Facebook and Twitter, with a store name callout. In the marketing world that is what we call “Advocacy”. Ad-vo-ca-cy. It’s the holy grail that all marketers seek, where your customers take on the job of marketer and tell others why your product/service is great, completely of their own accord!

The implication for marketers everywhere is that the customer experience should always be in the forefront of your mind. “How will this decision affect the customer, the buying experience and/or product usage occassion?”.

What silly things have businesses done to turn you off from buying something at the last moment? Leave your story in a comment.

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