Moving Tribes - the blog

What retailers can learn from publishing and vice versa

Cards on the table. I love magazines. I sometimes think I love the concept of the magazine more than the actual content – I can happily flick through one on almost any subject as long as it is well written, well illustrated and fun. When the combination of reviews, photography, top tips, bitesized articles and great big essays is just right, there is always a reason to keep turning the page and the magazine becomes a great way to pass some time.

Just like retail, the magazine publishing business is going through some tumultuous change. We might not buy our magazines on paper in the future, but instead consume them on tablets. That will change a lot for publishers – new technology creates new opportunities for content to become more interactive. The writers and producers of magazines will be able to engage with readers much more directly and will have to do so.

But just like retail, this change in technology and communication channel does not change the heart of the business. If you want to make money by producing written content on a given topic, you can still do so. You still need to gather together some great writers with subject matter expertise, you still need to edit their content and you still need to combine it together in interesting ways. The change in the physical medium is a huge one, to be sure, but the core opportunity is still there.

When a publisher worries about falling circulation, it is the same as a retailer worrying about falling footfall in their physical stores. It is an understandable concern, but fundamentally the wrong question.  The right question for the retailer is “can I build a relationship with customers where I can introduce them to products they might want to buy?”. The choice of channel only comes after that, and it might well be the case for many retailers that there is much less need for a physical channel than they suspect.

So it is for publishers. The right starting question is “if I produce some great content from terrific writers and photographers, will anyone be interested in paying to read it?”. The physical media choice can only come after that. Just like retailers, I suspect the answer for many publishers will be that yes, we want to read their content but that they will need to be bold about abandoning the high costs of physical printing.

There is a reason why the analogy between publishing and retailing is so strong. I suspect over time that these two industries will become one. If you are a publisher, one of the possible revenue streams from your content is to actually sell the products you are writing about, and in the tablet world that retail transaction is only a click away. Equally, if you are a retailer and want to give customers a reason to come back to you again and again, excellent editorial content is a real prize.

So perhaps two industries which are both wrestling with the change from physical to digital can help each other out more than they currently suspect?

Under the surface

Last week I wrote about the importance of digging under the surface of your customers’ attitudes to your business. It is critical to understand which elements of your service are really adding value to the customer experience and which are merely tolerated. Redesigning your services to eliminate things that are merely tolerated is the key to staying ahead of your competitors.

We used, amongst others, the example of supermarkets. If you question consumers carefully, you will find a significant subset who say “I like your range of products and enjoy being your customer, but the actual action of coming to the store each week to do a shop is not something I really enjoy”. That insight will lead you to develop an online home delivery service, as many have already. If you don’t, then you stand to lose those (often very valuable) customers to someone else who does.

By coincidence, a shopping experience this week offers a further lesson in service design. We had an online shop delivered from a supermarket. I’m not going to name and shame, because it isn’t my intention for this blog to be a consumer forum. The experience we had, however, was enlightening and I’d like to share it.

I’ve used all of the supermarkets over time, and find the online delivery experience is usually very smooth sailing from all of them. This particular brand is no exception. It was therefore fascinating to see what happened when it all went wrong.

The initial problem was simple. The driver accidentally gave us a couple of bags obviously intended for someone else, and presumably gave them ours. We got things we hadn’t ordered, and didn’t get things we had.

The process from there on, however, was so badly designed as to be comic. An email to the online shopping team got an automated response telling us someone would get back to us. After 2 days, we called and were told it takes 3 days for these issues to be looked at.  A phone call on day 4 got a flat denial from the callcentre that we’d ever emailed them at all, despite us being able to quote their reply.

The culmination was particularly disturbing. Eventually, the situation was simply handed to the manager of our local store, who was eventually reduced by staff shortages to bringing our missing shopping around himself, on his way home after 12 hours in store.

I hugely admire the store manager, to the point where I felt guilty that he’d taken so much upon himself, but the wider lesson for this retailer is more systematic. They have a good website, and an effective delivery operation. The processes behind all of that, however, have clearly not been designed with any care or attention. This is fundamentally a shop-based retailer operating a website, not a true home delivery business.

And there is the message for all of us operating consumer businesses. If last week’s lesson was that we need to be bold in redesigning our services to keep up with our customers, this week’s lesson is that when we do that, we need to put the time and effort into getting those redesigned services right from the ground up, or else we still stand to lose business to our rivals.

Are you asking the right questions?

Last week, we discussed the profound changes that may happen to consumer businesses as the next generation, with very different attitudes and expectations, become the major spending power.

That begs a wider question. How can we forecast the ways in which consumers will demand that our businesses change and evolve, when often those consumers won’t necessarily know that themselves? We want our business to be the first to catch on to new trends, to be the first to deliver a better service model for our consumers, but how do we figure out what that could be?

Here’s one trick. We need to stop asking customers about their overall attitude to our service, and dig into the details of every step we ask them to take.

A long time ago, an evening’s television watching involved walking across the room to turn on the TV and periodically walking back to change volume or change channel. Had you asked a group of avid TV watchers at the time, they’d probably have described their overall satisfaction with television as pretty high. If you were a manufacturer of TVs, you might have convinced yourself that all was well. Only with some very careful questioning would you have worked out that the specific process of changing channels was not adding to the overall experience – it was detracting from it. Then you’d have invented the remote control, and stolen a march on your rivals.

Exactly the same is true for retailers today wondering how to evolve their service models.

You probably know quite a lot about what your customers do – the number who arrive in your stores, the percentage who buy things, the products they buy. You might even measure how much they enjoy the experience and how likely they are to recommend your business to others.

But are you asking those more detailed questions about what it is like to be one of your customers? Those detailed questions that will allow you to invent your own equivalent of the remote control and get ahead of your competitors? Do you break down each element of your processes and decide whether they are adding to, or detracting from overall satisfaction?

As I’ve wandered through a huge range of shops over the last few months, here are some customer experience thoughts that have occurred to me:

• Millions of people each week push shopping carts around supermarkets doing their weekly food shop. For how many of them, however, is it a delightful journey of discovery and for how many a chore? If it’s a chore, we can be sure that the next generation will not tolerate it. That’s already evident in the growth of online supermarket shopping, but that is just the beginning.
• All along the high street today are early Christmas shoppers struggling with lots of shopping bags. Is the process of taking your purchases home in a bag always what you want? If you are on a fun trip to the West End with your friends, you may not want to be burdened in that way, and yet very few of the places you shop will offer anything resembling delivery to home from stores.
• In a whole range of retailers, self-service tills have become an important cost saver. If, however, the typical customer attitude to the experience is as negative as many suggest, can that really be the future – is there business mileage in making customer experiences worse?

In the search for higher standards of customer service and for competitive advantage, we should not be confused that customers will forever continue to put up with what they have always put up with. Finding the pain points in your service delivery and fixing them is the surest way to keep your business relevant to the next generation.