All work and no play

Mark Hurst of goodexperience.com just published an article on Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience. His main argument resonates with my own experience — that most companies overspend on advertising and underspend on the customer experience, be it on a web site, in-store or other important experience points.

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This evening, my girlfriend and I went to IKEA – our second home. We’ve furnished almost our whole appartment with IKEA furniture, so we’ve been there a lot over the years.

This evening, we needed to buy a bed for our new apparment. We’re moving in this weekend, so we need the bed right now. We cannot wait for delivery, so IKEA is our only option. The visit to IKEA was kicked off with their famous Swedish meatballs. I optimistically ordered a larger variant, with 15! meatballs. But they tasted like something made from too much fat and with some type of meat substitute. I felt like I was eating cheap food made for cheap people. But that’s probably part of their concept.

We found the bed that we wanted, we talked to the customer consultant, and he ordered the bed and gave us a receipt so that we could pick it up ourselves. But he mentioned that they only had one left, but wished us good luck.

We were in a hurry. The warehouse was closing in five minutes when I found the flat-packed bed in the pick-up department. Elisabeth also found a cheap TV-stand, but the only one they had left was a little damaged. The guys in the pick-up department wasn’t available so we decided to talk to the cashier about a discount.

We brought all our stuff to the check-out and waited in line. The friendly cashier apologized that she had no authority to give us a discount for the damaged TV-stand. We reluctantly accepted – it didn’t cost much anyway, and we didn’t have time to find a new one.

When she was about to ring the order for the bed, she told me that I had forgot to pick up one of the parts to the bed – item 2 out of 2. The receipt I’d gotten from the bed department didn’t say anything about two items. I asked her what to do, and she told me that I could go and pick it up after I had paid.

I asked Elisabeth to order home delivery service while I ran back to the pick-up department to get the extra item. On my way I saw people shutting off the lights and getting ready to go home. I asked two people for help, but they didn’t work in that department so they couldn’t really help me. I was almost panicing, I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and we would be stuck with an incomplete bed that we had allready paid for, Elisabeth was ordering home-delivery, and everybody who could help me had probably left the building already.

Suddenly this guy appeared. At first he looked like he was in the same situation as me, so I kind of nodded at him briefly, acknowledging that we were in the same boat. But this guy was here to help me – that was his words exactly: “I can help you”.

I was relieved and followed him searching through the warehouse. But could’t find the missing part and went to check on the computer.

No luck. They didn’t have any left. And they didn’t expect any new deliveries of the bed until the end of the month. He also checked the other IKEA in Oslo, but they didn’t have it either. So I called Elisabeth who was ordering home-delivery and asked her to cancel the order. There was no point in delivering an incomplete bed. We had to look for other alternatives.

We couldn’t find another bed at IKEA that evening. But me kind helper reassured me that we could just cancel the whole bed order, not just the missing item, and get the money back. He phoned the cashier and asked him to wait so that we could get our money back.

We went back to the check-out. The cashier was waiting for us, they were informed about our situation. While our helper helped us unload some of the other items from the shopping cart he noticed our damaged TV-stand. We told him we couldn’t get a discount from the cashier. But our helper told us that he could. He had that kind of authority. He was the Head of Customer Service of the night shift he said, gave us 30 per cent off and promised to transfer the amount to our account by the end of this week.

The cashier gave us the money that we had charged for the bed back in cash. No questions asked, and no comments about me being a difficult customer since I wanted to cancel the order. I almost wanted to apologize that I was keeping them at work after hours, but they were all smiling.

I shook my helper’s hand, and thanked him for helping us. Without him, I would still have been stuck in the pick-up department and I would probably have had to explain the problem to some person that wouldn’t have known how to fix the problem or have to take care of me as a customer.

He turned a bad experience into a positive and memorable one.

That was our experience repair guy.
Every company should have one.

IDEO – a Palo Alto based consultancy specializing in improving the health care experience from the patients’ perspective has a methodology that’s got a lot to contribute to other settings as well, f.ex. shopping, services etc.

They use a methodology that resembles an interaction design approach. In an interview with Mark Hurst of GoodExperience.com:

We took IDEO’s core process, and added new tools and methods to help instigate organizational change. Our high-level operating theory is, engage with the client, do a design project together. Use what you’ve learned from that to learn about the organization. Then redesign the *organization* to meet this offering you’ve created. So design the offering first, then design the organization to successfully deliver that offering.

Later in the interview, he continues:

Through experiments, we learn what actually works in the setting. We’re not forcing an idealized or unrealistic solution on people. So we experiment every week, and think about experiments two to five years out.

Another thing about their approach that I really appreciate is their motto:

“Fail early to succeed sooner.”

In order to improve an experience one has to try and test every new idea, the sooner the better. Proving new ideas right or wrong almost immediately should be very motivating for everybody involved and should generete more creative ideas. But an approach like this can only work in a culture that accepts that even great ideas sometimes fail.

There is a quote in this article Structures of Persuasion from the creator of a new literary magazine, The Believer, Heidi Julavits:

[Q]: And why did you put the Table of Contents on the back cover of the magazine?
[Heidi Julavits]: If you think about it, that’s actually the easiest place to find it.

That is a brilliant idea. Why not make the back cover a little more useful – use the space for a user-friendly table of contents instead of low-credibility sales-copy!