B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

The following excerpt from ReadWriteWeb shows a fantastic trend happening in retail environments today whereby consumers have instant access to pricing information on products via their mobile phone:

Stores Clueless About Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications?

With the rise of app-laden smartphones like the iPhone and Google’s Android OS, now on T-Mobile’s G1, many penny-pinching shoppers have downloaded barcode scanning applications onto their mobile devices. These apps allow consumers to compare the prices of merchandise on a store’s shelf to competing stores in the area just by taking pictures with their smartphone’s camera. The prices are instantly retrieved and displayed on the mobile phone so consumers can know before they buy if they’re getting a good deal.

via Stores Clueless About Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications? - ReadWriteWeb .

Mobile barcode scanning is like PriceGrabber; it puts the focus on service  and reasonable pricing from retailers, not only lowest possible price

The reason why I like mobile barcode scanning is because, as a consumer, this will put pressure on retailers to be competitively priced and (more importantly) focused on servicing the customer. If it mobile barcode scanning grows widespread, this will ultimately force retail channels to align with pricing in online channels.

Essentially, mobile barcode scanning acts as your own personal PriceGrabber.com. With PriceGrabber, you enter a product name and see competitive retailers, retailer rankings, and pricing:

With phones like the iPhones which blur the lines between internet device and mobile phone and have a built-in camera, barcode scanning becomes easy — snap a photo of the barcode, an iPhone application reads it, and then performs a web search for competitive pricing and availability much like PriceGrabber.

It’s difficult to find significant price savings across products and retailers on PriceGrabber — because the playing field has been leveled for retailers in the price game and forces them to focus on service. Price your products too high, and the masses will not buy from you. Price them low enough, well, you had better be able to support the service on the small profit margins you’ll be making.

If barcode scanning doesn’t enforce better service, then it will demand unique product assortments from suppliers at the retail level

A world where retailers all sell identical product assortments for virtually the same price is going to force retailers to differentiate in other ways. Sometimes this means the retailer will go private label with certain products. Or, retailers will demand a unique product selection from their supplier within a product category. Other times, retailers will negotiate exclusivity on products for a period of time. Larger retailers will do all three to be well diversified.

This burden/strain will ultimately land on the manufacturer’s/supplier’s shoulders; Brand names will win in this environment

Bar code scanning and the PriceGrabber’s of the world put added burden/strain on manufacturers/suppliers. The manufacturers will be forced to be creative in their go-to-market strategies as they launch new products across various retailers and channels. Well-recognized brands won’t fall victim (as much) to the bundling requirements, product assortment strategies, and channel-specific pricing.

Apple, for example, is represented identically across channels — with pricing being within single digits of each other between retailers. A barcode scan on an iPhone will show similar pricing across all channels of business and all retailers — thereby putting the emphasis back on the retailer to provide good service and support.

Consumers will win this battle

As much as retailers want to control the environment, at the end of the day, pricing shopping is what people will do, whether or not barcode scanning is banned. Ultimately, consumers will win this battle, and that’s a good thing.

My wife and I are spending a very untraditional Thanksgiving away from our extended families this year and we decided to forgo turkey and instead opted for Honey Baked Ham.

A simple shout-out to a no-nonsense store locator

A quick Google search for “honey baked ham” and they show up first in the list of natural results. Dead center on their homepage is a larger text and graphical callout to their “store locator”:

And within one click from their homepage, I’m shown a listing of local stores. Easy enough, right?

Store hours AND holiday hours posted on the website. Love it.

They went the extra mile to also display store hours during the Thanksgiving holiday — an added bonus!

My wife and I had arrived back at the house late Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving and wondered whether or not the store would be open on Thanksgiving day so we could pick up the ham then. Thanks to the website, it saved us a phone call, and 30 minutes later we had the ham and side dishes for our Thursday meal back at the house.

It’s the simple things…

The point? Very rarely do websites have hours of operations, particularly holiday hours, posted on their website. Such a small convenience can go a long way. It saved us a phone call to the store which ultimately saved them time by not having to field calls from consumers simply wanting to know their holiday hours.

This post about business processes as a competitive advantage hit home for me (it references a poor experience with an airline — which I’m sure we’re all familiar with). I am often jokingly ridiculed for how often I ask “why?” when evaluating internal business processes and the way data is organized in the enterprise. Quite often the answer is surprisingly, “I don’t know, that’s how it was done before I got here.”

In the link above, the same is true for the airline industry. It’s as if the entire industry was designed for an ideal world where there are no mechanical malfunctions, bad weather, or delays. Contingency planning and business process optimization go such a long way to improving operational efficiency and most importantly, customer satisfaction. Revisiting pre-existing processes is also a great way to find the low-hanging fruit of improvements.

When building any new business process or system, I find that the following question is helpful to ask over and over during the planning phase: Does this process add value for the end-user?

Such a simple question can go a long way to avoiding a situation like in the above post/link.

Last week we implemented the OpinionLab real-time feedback/rating tool on Levolor.com. I can’t tell you how helpful it’s been in just 1 week of usage.

OpinionLab hosts a real-time survey/feedback tool which most of us recognize as the little spinning icon in the lower right-hand corner of some websites:

When the above icon is clicked on our site, it spawns a new window with a comment card like this:

This is simply a generic comment card that we have running site-wide. The consumer can optionally fill out as much or as little information as possible and even provide open-ended feedback in the comments field. OpinionLabs then stores this data on their server, logs the consumer’s web browser, operating system, browser resolution, their responses, and the specific URL the comment was submitted on.

Keep your finger on the pulse of visitor satisfaction with your website
Over time, this information can be tabulated to gauge the satisfaction from a site-wide perspective, section perspective, or individual page perspective. At first, I was skeptical that consumers would actually use this feature, but they have been, and the feedback is outstanding. There is nothing quite like getting real-time feedback from consumers about all aspects of your website.

Accessibility and ease of use are critical
When feedback/comment cards are easily accessible, website visitors are much more inclined to use them. This is an important takeaway that I think web marketers often forget. Accessibility and ease-of-use are important factors for anything, not just comment cards: think e-mail marketing (being able to forward a newsletter to a friend), photos and videos (making it easy to send the photo/video to a friend), and sharing articles (again, being able to send a note to a friend quickly from the webpage, and not just copying and pasting the URL in an e-mail).

Real-time feedback is where it’s at.
I’m convinced that this is where all websites need to be at if they want to continue to improve and offer any value to their consumers. Instead of sending out a survey once or twice per year and making huge, sweeping changes, real-time feedback allows you to test incremental changes and get feedback instantly from site visitors. CNN.com has released a beta of their website which contains rather drastic changes, but they’ve also implemented the OpinionLab tool to be able to collect all feedback regarding the beta:

It’s been a particularly bad week for customer and client service from two very important vendors to us (*ahem*…Omniture & scene7). Rather than focus on the negatives, I will instead post my 100% satisfaction with the service and support of Rackspace Managed Hosting.

Web-based support that can be trusted for a speedy response
Rackspace has both phone and web-based tech support, but they are so speedy and courteous at responding to web-based support messages that I routinely go there first for a question, request, or resolution to a problem. How many companies can you say this about?

You know the drill: the cryptic support hierarchy laid out on a company site, insisting you search their knowledgebase first (which is always sub-par and rarely has the answer to your question), presenting you with a customer service contact form, and if you’re lucky, a toll-free support number.

I can’t tell you how many times my only point of contact is an e-mail address at a vendor either for their “technical support” or for an account manager. I always am concerned that the e-mail will go into a black hole and never be returned (e-mail is such a terrible way to manage tasks). I’ve been so accustomed to this, that I always end up BCCing myself so that I know to flag the e-mail for later follow-up. Otherwise, I’ll forget about it and I may never hear back unless I resend the e-mail.

A customer knoweledgebase that just works
The Rackspace support model is equally as fantastic. You have an account manager and essentially a “dedicated” team of support techs of varying skill sets that you’ll basically always deal with throughout the week. Each message is signed by the tech, an entire log of your conversation is available in their support ticket system, and it all just works — it’s a complete CRM solution customized for their business and the customer benefits from their collaboration. No matter who you talk to, they can access the same information anyone else in the company can access (aside from sensitive information like server passwords). What a concept!

Better yet, the account managers can access what the support people are doing with your account. Not the case at some vendors who have departments operating in silos.

Managing customer expectations
There’s nothing I love more than to report a problem or submit a request, get a response within a 2-hour window with a list of “next steps” and when it will be resolved by. Sometimes a customer problem is not a simple, 30-minute fix, either. Even the problems that keep Rackspace scratching their heads over the course of the week are kept up-to-date on a daily basis each week and always have a senior technician checking in on the status each day.

With these other vendors, I am the one checking in with them. Where’s the client service in that?

Anyway, thank you, Rackspace. Always a pleasure to deal with you.

This is surely making the rounds, but I wanted to draw attention to customer service with humor as demonstrated by Google Transit’s Joe Hughes. This is such a great way to give a large company a human touch, particularly with the sense of humor. The PR/buzz surrounding this is also going to be an added bonus.

I’m sitting in the Boston airport living in the wonderful world of customer service in the airline industry.

When checking in at the kiosk today, my reservation wasn’t found either when I used my credit card or when I entered my confirmation number. I proceeded to wait in line for an agent to help me. While waiting in line I witnessed the classic display of not servicing a customer:

A man, his wife, and 2 kids were checking luggage. I heard him ask why his seats were no longer next to each other (for his family) on the flight. The agent replied with, “I don’t know” and refused to help offer an explanation or reconfigure his seating arrangement. I could see his frustration, but because it was not worth his time to pursue it further (2 antsy kids clawing at his feet), he reluctantly lunged his bags onto the scale for the agent.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the experience at the airport check-in counters is always like this from airport-to-airport. It was as if this man had personally wronged the agent behind the counter!

On the flip side of the coin, I was dealing with a cancelled flight. I really wish the kiosk would have told me it was cancelled and that I would need to use those mysterious-looking black phones near the kiosks that are only designed to dial into customer service — a simple notification would have saved 10 minutes of my time waiting in line. Instead, I.waited, only to be told to use the phone to rebook my flight. Fine.

I spent more time on the phone on hold, at the airport. The agent on the phone couldn’t figure out why the flight was canceled, so this made me more confused. He could have put me on standby to fly me to an airport within an hour of my house (instead of the one only 15 minutes away). This one wasn’t cancelled. Since it was only standby, I didn’t want to check my bag and not get on the flight. Because the cancellation was “weather-related”, Delta couldn’t get me on another flight because “all other airlines will experience the dame weather-related issues.”

Unsatisfied with this answer, I thanked the agent for trying and proceeded to call American Express business travel (through our office). I hopped in a cab to get driven to the united airways terminal while I booked a flight over the phone for a flight out this evening that wasn’t cancelled. After getting my confirmation # seconds before getting to the kiosk to check in, I was all set.

The AMEX business travel agent was fabulous in accomodating my travel needs and dealing with my distracted attention span while I hustled from terminal-to-taxi-to-terminal-to-kiosk. Likewise, united airways was curtious during check-in too, and fielded my stupid questions about the weather causing delays.

Delta could take some customer service lessons from other folks in the industry. The airline industry in general could do a better job managing traveler expectations during inclimate weather situations as well.

Oh how I can relate with this post and this post — managing expectations, or lack thereof.

Consumers need an explanation
The points made in these posts are so very true and they really ring home for retail website managers and developers: visitors don’t care about the technology on your site, they just want product information so they can make a purchase.
Take for example blinds and shades. Arguably one of the most complex products on earth when it comes to ordering (I’m not kidding). There are literally millions of combinations available to order a 2″ Wood Blind. Nobody thinks about this when they come into a store to order them. Consumers are bombarded with the options and choices they have to make just to cover their windows. As a marketer, it’s really quite comical to experience.

Our website is undergoing a usability study next week. In my call with the person managing the study, I found myself becoming defensive because the organizer did not understand how our products are manufactured (if you know how our products are manufactured, then you understand why they are presented the way they are). But then it dawned on me, she doesn’t care and why should she? If I have to explain to her why certain options are not listed on the website, then the website is not doing a good job of managing the consumer’s expectations. It just needs to be easy to shop and get the information she needs. But how does “easy” translate to managing expectations?

Don’t be afraid to address FAQs up-front
Manufacturers, I think, are too scared at times to tell the consumer the real reason why a product cannot be made a certain way or are fearful that FAQs represent uncertainty with the product. The more educated a consumer is about our product, the more informed their decision is when they go to purchase which translates into buying with confidence. This also helps reduce or eliminate buyer’s remorse. By explaining why things are the way they are and giving consumers everything they need to know (and anticipating) their questions, you manage their expectations. Their takeaway is a pleasant experience and not an experience that “there’s too many options and restrictions that are too difficult to understand.” Too often marketers are the ones doing the selling, when there needs to be a sales person doing the selling as well. A good salesman understands the needs and pain points for their customers. This is exactly what a website should do.

Be prepared for the unknown and unexpected
Often times however, you cannot anticipate everything, so you’ve got to think on your toes. This is where a website’s power comes into play in terms of evolving with the consumer. As frequently asked questions roll in, address them on the website in a knowledgebase or a blog. Don’t hide them as if they somehow degrade your product — help the consumer wade through their questions. Your website should act like a salesperson — helping them coast along that sales conversion funnel all the way down to purchase with minimal-to-zero frustration. Evaluate the frequency of customer support phone calls and e-mails about products and identify key, frequently asked questions that can be addressed higher up in the sales funnel. You should see call volume drop and faster conversions online (assuming they are shopping/browsing online initially).

It’s OK to air your dirty laundry…sometimes
Sometimes you need to air your dirty laundry to help consumers understand why things happened the way they did. This is necessary to help justify why a bad experienced happened. Airing dirty laundry comes with a price — you must somehow compensate the consumer for their time and the bad experience. This will vary by industry, but the movie theater example makes an excellent point. This is particularly good practice when doing damage control in an online forum where your brand is being thrashed. Managing expectations is more than just reading the marketing material on your product’s brochure, it’s being a salesman and service provider to your customer.