Consumer Behaviour

I honestly believed that I would stick with PC based computing.  After twenty years using PCs they’re more familiar than my wife and kids!

Despite all the positive things friends have said about Macs, and even though I have owned an iPhone for the last couple of years, there were good reasons not to change.  PCs have always worked well for me and, on the occasions when I have used Macs, I’ve always found them uncomfortably unfamiliar.

If nothing else, we humans are creatures of habit: it takes quite a shove to push us out of our comfort zone and into unchartered territory.  For me and PCs that shove was Dell.

I enjoy observing my own consumer decision-making and, although I know that much of the action takes place outside of my conscious awareness, my work on the consumer unconscious mind gives me a dual perspective for my own consumer behaviour.

I’ve owned several Dells, you could have called me brand loyal.

When my Dell XPS 420 greeted me with news of a critical drive failure (Windows Recovery did nothing of the sort) my immediate reaction on being told to replace it was to go to Dell.

Within half an hour I had found a specification that worked for me and ordered a laptop.

So, despite the trauma of a crashed computer, I still went back to the company I knew and that had worked for me in the past: call it the “better the devil you know” heuristic.

However, I discovered, after a fairly painful on-line ordering process, that somehow my billing address had been entered into my account, but that my old address – one that I haven’t lived at for four years – was still recorded as the delivery address.

Unperturbed, I immediately called Dell to ask them to correct the address.  To my astonishment this was not possible.

My bank had verified the payment, but Dell’s own systems had held the order up because the delivery address didn’t match the card address (the whole reason for my call and a helpful safeguard against fraud).

However, apparently this couldn’t be corrected with a few key strokes and would take 3-5 days.  This despite the fact that the address I wanted the item sent to was the only one that would have passed their internal fraud checks – the one that matched the card I’d paid with.

Staggered that a computing company could have such cumbersome systems I asked to speak to the department concerned.  I was told that communication with them was only by email.

Frustrated, I asked them to cancel the order.  Rightly or wrongly, my intention at this point was still to order another computer from Dell after updating my address details.

I was told that I couldn’t get confirmation of my order being cancelled for 24 hours – it might not be possible to cancel it. Both the operator and I knew that the order hadn’t been despatched, it was just sitting there because of the erroneous address.  And yet, it couldn’t be cancelled!  (I should add that this wasn’t for a ‘made-to-order’ machine.)

This was the final straw.  I decided that to continue a consumer relationship with a company whose systems were so fundamentally consumer unfriendly was asking for trouble: heaven help me if I had a problem with the new computer.

A visit to the local stores involved the anticipated issue of computer staff who knew less about the products than me (and I don’t know much).  Enquiring about Sony’s power-save feature, which offered the potential of squeezing out more than the pathetic two hours of battery life from their top of the line machine, resulted the ‘revelation’ that it used less power and meant that the laptop battery would last a lot longer if you weren’t using it.

I wandered over to the Apple display, to consider if I could make the switch.  There was a lot to consider: running Microsoft products on a Mac, transferring my old PC files, even running software not designed for Macs.

When I heard a voice ask if I needed help I was ready to say “No thanks” until I glanced up and saw that the person was dressed differently from the rest of the salespeople I’d encountered.  He was wearing a black t-shirt with a white Apple logo.

My heart leapt.

Or rather my unconscious mind fired off a set of associations; all the brand values and social proof about Apple that have permeated through to my unconscious were fired up, along with the creative values that have been shown to be stimulated by (unconscious) exposure to the Apple brand.

“Yes,” I found myself saying, “you probably can help.”

Half an hour later every question I’d had had been answered.

The contrast between the Apple staff and the Dell phone experience could not have been more marked.  Similarly, the contrast between the useless store staff and the ‘branded’ Apple employee was enormous.

Apple was already delivering a nicer life (and I hadn’t bought the MacBook yet).

Being a great brand isn’t (conceptually) hard.  It requires just two things.  An attractive concept and congruent delivery.  Apple get top marks for delivering both.

I don’t intend to become an Apple evangelist: I think my brother is doing enough of that for the UK population, but I can’t hide my admiration for their products and services.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, Customer Service Apple, consumer behaviour, Customer Service, Dell

Large companies spend a fortune on customer service: implementing it, training people, monitoring it and, yes, even researching it.

And yet all too often when you deal with a company it seems apparent that they just don’t get it.

Take Barclays – one of the largest financial services companies in the UK.  Last week I was in the centre of Cambridge and, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious, they had a team of blokes dressed as Grenadier Guards (the ones who wear the bearskin headgear) except with corporate blue tunics rather than red and giving out balloons rather than shooting at people.

No doubt this was a bold marketing campaign to draw attention to what a lovely bank Barclays is.  And it must be said that the people in uniform were great; joking with shoppers as they passed by.

Unfortunately, the person I dealt with in their customer service department was a happy little soldier; she was a grumpy proceduralist (if such a word exists).

I rang to pursue a refund that I was owed – ‘bank error in your favour’ kind of thing (except, of course, it actually just means they’ve been looking after my money for a couple of years and are returning it interest free).  They had promised it seven weeks ago.  I should add that I don’t bank with Barclays, this was a separate financial transaction.

It transpired that they had sent the cheque to an address I hadn’t lived at for a number of years, rather than the one that I, as convention dictates, had written in the top right of the letter I sent them requesting it.

Now everyone makes mistakes.  That’s not the issue.  My issue is that when, having made a mistake and acknowledged it, they neither apologise nor seek to do the most basic thing to make amends.

“I’ve just spoken to accounts, they send they’ll send another cheque; can I check your address.”

“What do you mean, another cheque?  What happened to the first one?”

“We sent it to your old address.”

“What, the one I haven’t lived at for three years.  Great.”

“Do you want it sending to the address on your letter?”

“As confusing as that obviously was, yes please.”

“That will be with you in the next 21 days.”

“Hang on; 21 days?  How about asking them to send it out today so that I get it tomorrow; after all they’ve made the mistake.  Please would you ask them to do that?”

“We have to say it will be 21 days.” (This is a bank, remember; they can make an instant payment on your behalf, sometimes for a fee, but they can’t get one to me).

And there, in that last statement from the customer service lady, is the illustration of why some companies just don’t understand customer service.  No flexibility, no real reaction to the issue, just a process. 

No sense of cause and effect, no sense of responsibility, no recognition that the problem they have caused me exists for me in the context of my experience of them as a bank; not their context of dealing with millions of transactions every day.

I am being treated in the way they have decided it is reasonable to treat someone; irrespective of circumstances.

As I said, I don’t bank with Barclays.  And guess what; it doesn’t matter how many balloons the blue soldiers give me or my children, I’m not going to.

Philip Graves Customer Service Barclays, barclays bank, Customer Service

It’s often claimed in market research circles that perception is everything.

I suspect this stems from the thought that, provided the customer perceives things as being good then that is what matters, be it customer service, product quality, your brand’s image.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a really stupid way of thinking about consumers. Let me explain…

In one sense, perceptions are all that customers have to provide in market research. Life isn’t absolute when you’re living it. For example, I’ve been having some lower back ache (too much time spent writing in a bad chair) and have been treating it with a physiotherapist and lots of exercises. Unlocking my lower back has caused other parts of my back to react and the other night I turned over and stretched at night and managed to pull a muscle higher up my back.

Now, at the moment, my lower back doesn’t hurt. So I perceive that my lower back is fine. However, this is largely because my pain attention is directed higher up at the part that really hurts. In reality, the issues in my lower back are not resolved yet, it’s going to take a few weeks to undo what I’ve done over many months. So my perception about my back is almost certainly misleading.

If you ask me now how bad my back health is I will say it’s fairly bad: my attention is directed at the pain right now and I’m very sensitised to backs.

But if you ask me in a couple of weeks, when I expect it to be considerably better, I will probably say that my back is pretty healthy. In a couple of weeks it shouldn’t be hurting me any more, but I’ll have many more weeks of exercises to do to make it properly mobile.

Perceptions change over time. The further people are from an event the less likely they are to perceive it accurately.

When it comes to customer service (for example) what matters is what service you actually deliver. The only way you can judge that is by seeing what experience you deliver to customers.

They may say that service is poor because they’re expecting red carpets and rose petals.

They may say that service is good because they have such low expectations of your brand.

You have no way of knowing what frame of reference they’re making, how time is shaping it or how recollections of experiences will be factored in to future purchase behaviour.

All you have is a score. Which feels compelling because it has a number attached. But it’s actually meaningless.

Ah, they say, we can track it over time.

So now you know how a meaningless number changes. That’s helpful!!

The solution?

Decide what quality of service you want the customer to experience and design your service to deliver that.

Then watch, dispassionately, to see if it looks as though customers are getting that experience.

If you want them to leave the store delighted, look for delight on their face: we all know what ‘delighted’ looks like, don’t we?

If you’re studying the moment that customer service happens you’re studying reality. If you’re asking customers what they think you’re getting perceptions but you have no way of knowing their durability or relevance to that customers future behaviour.

There. That should save your company some wasted money on customer satisfaction surveys.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Customer Service, market research Customer Service, design, market research, perception, reality

Mostly I think customer service is a matter of common sense; but as we all know common sense can be a surprisingly rare commodity.

One of the biggest problems I encounter with customer service people is the procedures they’re shackled to.  Not only are those procedures infuriatingly short-sighted at times, they also tend to have the effect of causing the customer service agent to turn his or her brain off. 

A customer service  encounter I experienced today didn’t run into trouble for any of these reasons though.  The person at the (small) company was clearly bright, sensible and not tied to any procedures; it may very well have been her own company.

But when I asked when I could expect delivery of a product I’d ordered four weeks ago that they’d told me would be delivered in about four week’s time I was told that, “We’re doing a collection from the manufacturer on Friday but I can’t say if your order will be on it.”

No offer to find out.  No suggestion that it was unusual that something could be manufactured to order and yet the manufacturer not be able to say when it was ready.  Nothing in her tone suggested that anything was amiss at all.

In fact, when I said that I was “disappointed” that she couldn’t tell me, she was mildly aggrieved.  She explained that this was the process, that this was how the manufacturer did things, and that they ordered a lot of products from this manufacturer.

We ended up discussing whether this was a reasonable way of managing supply chains for quite some time, perhaps ten minutes; my view was that it was not.

Eventually I found out that it all came down to one thing.  The manufacturer was unreliable.  All the companies that manufactured this product were small, old, unreliable companies.  The retailer had tried to provide more specific delivery timing in the past and ended up constantly disappointing customers when orders weren’t fulfilled as expected.

The error that the person I spoke to made was simply to assume that a situation she had assimilated over time would make as much sense to me as it did to her.  It never occurred to me that, in this day and age, someone would have no option but to use unreliable suppliers.

They’d arrived at a compromise that was the best of a bad set of alternatives, as far as minimising customer disappointment was concerned, but that didn’t mean it made any sense to me.  Their process for providing delivery dates made sense to them, but not to me.

I’m glad I expressed my disappointment, and I’m glad I pushed and pushed until I’d uncovered the assumptions that, despite seeming obvious to the retailer, were unknown to me.

So, if you want to avoid upsetting your customers:

• Try and put yourself in their position, they don’t have your knowledge.
• Don’t take offense when a customer challenges what you say; if you’re sure it’s reasonable they evidently don’t have the same perspective and you have the chance to provide it.
• A customer that tells you he’s “disappointed” is giving you opportunity to set the record straight, not attacking you personally.
• Avoid procedures that suit your organisation but make it harder for customers and turn off your customer service people’s brains!.
• Empower people providing customer service to do whatever they need to (within reason) to address and satisfy customer issues.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Customer Service Customer Service