Archives for category: Customers

Post Boxes

February 27, 2019 //

Ah, the red UK post box. An iconic, timeless image, replicated thousands and thousands of times across the length and breadth of the country. Barely a few hundred yards apart, a part of the community, a true local service.

I don’t live in the UK, I live in Ireland, and the post boxes here are green. One thing I’ve noticed about living in Ireland, and I find it one of the very few irksome things because I’m used to the UK set-up, is that post boxes are few and far between. In fact, in the country they’re almost as rare as hen’s teeth.

Obviously there’s a huge cost attached to serving an infrastructure of thousands of drop points for post, and I’m sure the UK has ‘streamlined’ its own network of them over the last couple of decades. That said, a local post box is a huge community service and makes it so much easier for getting your letter or parcel from A to B. It’s the inverse of the last mile, and in sales the last mile can be very expensive to serve. In Ireland, they have post boxes at the post office, but you’d be hard pressed to find them anywhere else in small towns or decent sized villages.

The post box is a dinosaur, I know. Sometimes, though, when you can’t get near the post office – or it’s located in a place that’s impossible to stop near if you’re doing a drive by, it’s a big headache getting your package away.

A handy post box is something I never take for granted, and always try to memorise in towns I often go to.

Tags community, postal service

Categories Customers, General, Marketing

The Unfulfilled Promise of Unopened Pistachio Shells

February 22, 2019 //

I love nuts, the salted kind. I’m not a huge fan of the unsalted kind, they taste pretty bland to me. Nuts are a good way of me staving off my hunger pangs with something that, in moderation, is pretty good for me.

With nuts you pay by weight. You pay for all the weight, shells included. In an average bag of pistachio nuts you get around 5 to 10% of nuts which are still closed or not sufficiently opened from the roasting process to be edible. That means you’re only getting 90 to 95% of what you paid for, and less if you count the weight of the shells.

For me it’s the unfulfilled promise of unopened pistachio shells. They go straight into the food bin or the fire, even though I’ve invested in their promise of taste and nutrition, in that order.

OK, so sometimes you get a burnt piece of cereal, but it’s one of maybe a thousand or more in the pack, which I’m prepared to tolerate from a 3- or 4-sigma variance point of view. But with pistachios, it’s different. It’s 5 or 10% of the flipping things. It’s more real, more tangible. It’s like buying broccoli when you never eat the base of the main stalk.

How hard can it be for the highly sophisticated food production or processing plants to exclude the nuts that don’t open sufficiently after the roasting phase and are not worthy of making the final cut?

Is it too hard, or is too lazy, or too greedy on the part of the producers?

Tags Brand, Food production, pay by weight, Quality

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

The Health Food Shop Smell

February 20, 2019 //

I’ve written before about how powerful our sense of smell can be for evoking feelings, memories and so on.

Some things obviously have a recognisable smell to them, like a chocolate factory for example – d’oh! – that immediately connects. I get the ‘recognisable smell’ feeling whenever I walk into a health food store.

What is that smell? Is it the supplements? It smells strong, other worldly and hard to identify, but it’s unmistakeable nonetheless. All health food stores have this smell. It seems impossible to counteract, even if you wanted to diminish or alter it.

For me it’s not a particularly nice smell. It feels artificial, chemical almost. But it is recognisable, identifiable, connecting, which is a good thing if you have such a store.

Tags Brand, Connection, Smell

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Please

February 11, 2019 //

Often a simple ‘thank you’ is all people need for the acknowledgement of their work. Someone remembering or taking time out to tell them that their efforts are appreciated.

So it is with ‘please’, the mannerly corollary to thank you. Simple, thoughtful manners go a long way to getting what we need, and sometimes what we want too. It makes the person we’re asking feel better about donating their time too. I always try to say please when I’m asking for something, no matter how insignificant the ask is. It’s a basic human courtesy.

In my view, we should be demanding that voice activation technologies like Siri and Alexa be reprogrammed to only comply with our commands when we say please. ‘Alexa, can you play Ten Story Love Song by the Stone Roses on Spotify, please?’ How hard is that?

Much more importantly, especially with youngsters, what great behaviours would those engrained manners encourage for interacting with other human beings?

Tags Behaviour, Manners, Please, Thank you

Categories Communication, Customers, General

Squeezable Marmite Jar

February 4, 2019 //

I’ve written before about the need for product manufacturers to design and deliver the whole product solution, or in other words, the entire customer experience, rather than just their product.

This includes the packaging, the accessories, everything you use when you consume the product.

A case in point is the squeezable marmite jar. You either love it or hate it, as the advertising goes, and I’m one of the lovers when it comes to Marmite, always have been. The unmistakeable branding, smell, consistency, taste and round glass jar. In the last few years the Marmite folk have taken to using a squeezable plastic jar to deliver their gooey goodness.

The trouble is, the stuff is so damn viscous that you can’t get more than 70 or 80% of the product out of the jar; the jar won’t squeeze down enough. I purchase a replacement jar – glass – before I realised a good bit of my purchase was yet to be consumed. To get value for your money, and who doesn’t want that, you have to twist the top off and collect the stuff from the inside of the top and the mouth of the jar. It gets everywhere, and leaves your kitchen cupboard, the jar and your hands a sticky mess. Not a good experience.

All the stuff outside of the product itself is an important part of the overall experience. You have to get all of it right, or you risk turning away first-time triers and seasoned customers.

Tags Customer Experience, Marmite, Packaging, Whole Product Solution

Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Empty Buses

January 28, 2019 //

Is there a more depressing sight than an empty in service bus in a major town or city? Maybe there is, perhaps a full in service bus in the driving rain that you’re trying to get onto.

Anyway, it’s hard to run through all the reasons in a minute or less as to why I find an empty bus depressing. The lost productivity, the inefficient use of my tax-paying dollars, the additional traffic burden of a vehicle not designed for the narrow streets of an ancient city but which only makes sense if it’s nearly full and takes a number of cars off the road. Where to start?

Buses are designed to ease traffic by offering commuters a cost-effective and convenient way of getting into the centre of town so they don’t have to stomach high parking charges and hideous traffic. Throw in bus lanes, and buses and taxis combine to make city centre navigation by public transport bearable, preferable and sometimes even enjoyable.

But when you see empty buses around the place, then someone has got the load planning way wrong. Maybe it’s political, or maybe they don’t care, don’t want to improve the service, I don’t know. For me, it’s like using a service that’s supposed to be every 15 minutes, but really it’s every 30 minutes because buses gather in twos or even threes and convoy the route, taking it in turns to leapfrog each other at each stop, for an easier life. It’s not in the interests of the paying customer, because the organisation is not genuinely incentivised by and therefore geared to the needs of the paying customer.

Tags Efficiency, Public Transport

Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

Staff Parking in Public or Private Organisations’ Car Parks

January 25, 2019 //

I’m sure I’ve written before about US strip malls and the fact that staff park their cars in the furthest away spots to allow their paying customers to take the most adjacent spots. It simple, thoughtful and common sense practice.

You don’t see so much of it in Europe in my experience. Staff seem to get priority. That cosy consultant’s parking space at the front of the hospital. How come they get that? Surely it should be for the nurses or the midwives who do most of the bloody work, no pun intended. Or perhaps, revolutionary thought, the patients, who have to pay to park in the next parish.

Anyway, I was waiting in the car park for my 9 o’clock doctor’s appointment the other day to rid myself of a pesky chesty cough that I didn’t want advancing to a chesty infection. I was 8 minutes early and so people watched from the comfort of my car. By 8:58, the car park was full, since staff had used up both the car park and the spaces behind the surgery which are supposed to be for staff only. There simply aren’t anywhere near enough spaces for both staff and paying patients.

Who has to to park on the curb? The paying patient of course, who in this country funds the vast majority of the salary of the attending staff.

Madness, I tell you. If I ruled the world, or at least administered some of it…

Tags Customer Orientation, Customers, staff

Categories Communication, Customers, General, Strategy

Automation and Acquired Behaviour

January 23, 2019 //

Automation exists to make our lives easier, or sometimes to make our supplier’s life easier. We adapt our traditional manual behaviour to new behaviours on the basis that the new behaviour, thanks to the automation, is easier or less effort, or both, for us.

A few months ago I was in a gallery in Dublin and went to use the facilities on the way out. never waste a chance to use the facilities of the facility you’re in – no double pun intended – especially when you’re in a big city.

After completing my task and washing my hands, I moved across to the automatic hand dryer and hovered my hands under it and waited for the sensor to pick up my presence and whizz my hands into a dried frenzy.

Nothing doing, damn thing was broken I concluded, after several experimental variations of hand position.

Turns out I had mistaken an empty paper napkin dispenser for an automatic hand dryer. Learned behaviour, on auto-pilot, had let me down. Back to the drawing board, or rather another dispenser with a napkin or two in it.

Tags Automation, Behaviour, Habit, Instinct

Categories Communication, Customers, General

Square Bowls

January 21, 2019 //

The vast majority of bowls are round. It’s simply the right shape to polish off as much of the contents as possible. Sure, square or rectangular bowls are more efficient for storage and look different, but that’s about the extent of the pros list.

My mother’s had these square bowls for ages. Well, they’re not actually square in the sense of an equal-sided quadrilateral. They’re rectangular, or oblong if you prefer the sillier-sounding version. They’re part of that range of everything for the home designed by the ‘George’ bloke who made his name at Next and after that with Asda. Every time I eat my cereal out of them, it reminds me why I dislike them.

Firstly, you can’t add the right amount of milk because the cereal is differently distributed compared to in the circular bowl you’re used to. Usually you end up putting too much in. I don’t like too much milk with my cereal.

Then you can’t get the smaller bits of the cereal out of the corners. The spoon’s too rounded to make it an easy job.

Finally, you can’t drain your bowl like you can with a round one. It kind of pools in areas rather than being drawn effortlessly into the centre under control of the force of gravity.

No, they’ll never go mainstream, those square bowls, square wheels never did. They can’t, surely.

Tags Bowls, Crockery, Eating, Utility

Categories Customers, General

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