Part II: Online and Offline Customer Experiences Matter--But Are Different!

By Peter Messana, Contributor

This is part two of a two-part series on the key touch points for our Customer Experience (CE) at Austin Kayak (ACK).  Part one focused on the physical store, while the following explains how we are working to create a great customer experience online.  For a little background, we operate three physical retail stores in Texas (Austin, San Marcos & Houston) and a successful Internet site

In the first part of this two part blog I laid out how we produce great and out of the ordinary Customer Experience (CE) to our customers that visit our brick and mortar stores.  In the traditional world you get to interact with your Customer face-to-face.  In some respects it is easy, they have devoted the time necessary to drive to your location and have invested time that for most of us is precious.  Once in our stores, the sales conversation rate is amazingly high.

Now transfer that to the online world, we have been selling online for a little over five years and providing amazing CE, but the experience we provide online is much different than that in our physical stores, we are not afforded the opportunity to talk face-to-face and hold your hand, we don’t even know who you are until after you have placed your order (unless you have called).

One might think that to compete online you simply take your offline recipe and mimic it online, but you can’t, you don’t get to meet the customer until typically after they have purchased and meeting them means you get a name and address.  We can’t offer a ‘Try before you buy’ -instead we have to find ways to make the decision easier.

Great online CE starts with trust, your customer has to trust you, they invest very little time running a google search and clicking links, you might be one of ten places, all with the same price; you have to get them to ‘trust’ you and fast.  I mentioned in my first part that the conversation rate in our physical stores is absurdly high, in the online world it is absurdly low, people don’t have to invest true ‘time’ shopping you, they come and go and fast, you have to gain the trust and gain it fast.

One quick way we try to gain trust is by putting our phone number on every single web page.  We want you to call, we really do.  Those that call convert near the absurd physical store conversation rates and the average sale for a phone order is 3x the amount.  If we could get every online customer to call it would be heavenly.  If you do call, don’t expect some call center person answering the phone, we hire real people that love the outdoors and talking to people.  Notice I said nothing about sales people, we have a policy that prohibits the hiring of phone sales people, they are great at selling widgets, we sell experiences.

While getting people to call is a great goal it is unattainable, most people shopping online want absolutely nothing to do with talking to people, they will email you before calling.  While not nearly as good as a phone call, email requires another form of trust.  Hit the “Contact Us” and send an inquiry and chances are that you will get a reply back instantly.  Our average response time is 19 minutes.  If 19 minutes does not sound fast, that number includes nights when no one is staffing our email system.  Email is a fantastic venue if you do it right.  Our replies are thorough and if you put your phone number in the first email we will call you, you gave us the right and we aren’t going to pass up the chance.

To gain further trust we have messaging at each step of the shopping experience, should you not call or email, we are up front that our shipping is free for all orders over $39, no gimmicks, add $39.01 to the cart and shipping is gone, no coupon necessary.  Add an item to you cart and view your cart, we put the final price right there for you, we don’t need your zip code to figure out your shipping cost, it is $4.95 if under $39 and $0 if over, fairly simple.  Checkout is three simple steps where we don’t over message you, no cross selling allowed in our checkout process, it is about speed and simplicity.

So you have trusted us enough to place an order, this is where the magic happens and where the true CE takes place.  All the promises made are only good if you keep them.  We are lightening fast in our order processing and shipping.  To us, this is where the real juju happens, it is where we spent our time building our own technology that allows us to ensure all orders are shipped that we promised and then some.  That shipping clock I mentioned counts down till 4pm, but really if you get your order in by 6pm it is going out that day, those that order between 4 and 6pm are told it will ship tomorrow, that is a lie, we are over-delivering.  Our processing and shipping is fast because we built it from the ground up, we didn’t have to adhere to someone else’s process.  We made the process first, the technology second.

How fast is our shipping?  If you live in Texas you will have your order tomorrow and if you ordered on Friday and picked a residential address it is going to be arriving on Saturday, no extra charge.  Don’t live in Texas, no problem, we cover 85% of the country in 3 days or less, some of that is just plain luck of shipping out of Texas, but it is also due to our shipping technology that we built to figure out the fastest and cheapest route to get you the order.

Once we have your order you are hooked on our Customer Experience and for us it is about the referral business and the repeat business.  In the online world you are only as good as your last performance and with countless competitors you had better always be on top of your game, a slip up and the customer is gone in a flash, if you are lucky they go quietly, if not you find yourself following their tweets, blogs and forum postings.

What you probably have noticed, the CE online is nothing like that of our physical stores in that the processes are very different, what is the same is our product selection, pricing, and no pushy sales efforts. Importantly, straight honesty is the same, the difference is you have to work that much harder online to convert a customer and you often don’t get to talk to them to gain any trust.

Peter Messana is CEO and Co-Owner of ACK.  Part II of his piece, describing how ACK provides incredible ONLINE Customer Experience, will appear on Wednesday, April 4th.

Online and Offline Customer Experiences Matter--But Are Different!

By Peter Messana, Contributor

This is a two-part series on the key touch points for our Customer Experience (CE) at Austin Kayak (ACK).  In the first part I will be laying out our recipe of success for our physical stores, followed by how we are bridging the offline and online world to provide the same great CE.  For a little background, we operate three physical retail stores in Texas (Austin, San Marcos & Houston) and a successful Internet site

Part I – Physical Traditional Stores

Customer Experience (CE) in our stores is similar to practically no one else, and it is what makes us so successful.  We go way over the top to provide the best possible Customer Experience, but honestly how we do it isn’t all that secretive.   If you have been to a Marketing 101 class you have undoubtedly heard of the five P’s (People, Process, Place, Price and Product).  This blog covers that, not because this is a business course or because I couldn’t find my own cute analogy, but rather because it holds the basis for our recipe of success.  I will also be honest that I wrote this blog before this paragraph and only came back to reference the five P’s because it seemed that someone reading would certainly notice that I was not being original.

Our physical store recipe is simple; it starts with our location (see prior blog).  Our out of the ordinary location is the first step in our recipe to provide amazing CE by allowing us to focus on the customer and spend as much time as needed or wanted.  Next up is the hiring of employees that are not good salesmen but rather great listeners, advocates for the sport, and just plain fun, happy people that will sell the ‘right’ product.  The last main ingredient is our product selection, we do a Good, Better, Best selection but our ‘good’ is most company’s better and even possibly their ‘best’, we do not play around in the entry level products that are not of high quality--inferior products produce bad customer experiences.

You may have noticed that I have left price out of the equation, while price is certainly important we do not drive any of our CE on price discounting and quite frankly it is the least thought about ingredient. We are not the low price leader; we are the low price follower.  We will never be the first to reduce our price but we will never keep our price higher than anyone else, including internet competitors.  To me personally, nothing is more frustrating than buying something and going home to find out that Amazon had it for 50% less, to me you have failed me.  No matter how great your service was or how convenient you are to me, you have taken advantage of the convenience and thus of me. 

The other main thing to understand about us and price is that we will NEVER run a sale.  I cannot stress that enough; while it may work for some people and their business model for us we see no need and no value.  Sure a sale can drive traffic and sales, I clearly understand that, but it can also be counter to your CE efforts.  Think of the last time you went and purchased something only to find out it went on sale the next week.  Providing Day-in-Day-out prices makes it much easier for our employees to sell, they don’t have to worry about what is on sale this week or when the next sale is, they are there to sell the ‘right’ product, not the best ‘deal’.  The other pitfall of sales is that you train your customer to wait for the sale.  Would any of you ever go to Michaels and pay full price for framing?  They run 50% off sales three-quarters of the year.  Or how about those 20% off Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, if you pay full price for an item you have been taken advantage of, all you had to do was wait a week and check your mail.  Customer’s are easily trained, we train ours to expect the best price everyday and you are welcome to price shop, should you find it less, unlikely but can happen, we don’t flinch to match the price.

Once we have you in our store our amazing CE takes over and hooks you.  It starts with the no pressure sales atmosphere.  Our employees are not commissioned and never product ‘spiffed’ (Spiffing in the retail world is common place whereby employees get some sort of bonus for selling a specific product.)  Why don’t we commission our employess?  Well, the sales process typically consists of multiple visits covering multiple employees, add the fact we only sell the ‘right’ products and never over sell, it only makes sense.  Spiffing would also be highly detrimental as it would push a product that might not be the right product for the need.  We have some very simple rules, since we pledge the ‘right’ product we will special order any product that we do not carry in our company at no additional charge.  If we don’t have it in the store but located in our warehouse or another store, we will either transfer it to the store for you to pick up, or, if you need it in a hurry we simply place an internet order and it ships directly to your house and arrives the next day if we get the order in before 6pm.

Our commitment to the right product can also be found in our bi-annual Demo Days where we bring 90 different models out for customer to try, we make it a giant event and bring in all the manufacturers to display their products, it isn’t a ‘sales event’ at all, we do have a ‘special pricing’ but do note we do not advertise the event as a sale and nothing we are pushing is about selling, it is about trying and testing.  It is a fine line we tread on our anti-sale mantra.  The second place you will see our commitment is in our “try before you buy”.  Buying a kayak is not easy, you can sit in it on the floor but that doesn’t do much, so we encourage you to try it out first.  To do this it means we often load a kayak right off our floor and send you to the water for you to try it out, if you don’t like it, no worries, take a different one and try it.  We do ask you to be careful but quite frankly 50% of the boats that people try and don’t buy get scratched and we remove them from the ‘new’ category and sell them as ‘used’.  Someone is going to get a killer deal on a few scratches.

After you have purchased and we have provided our amazing service we do one last thing that is out of the ordinary.  We get your full name and address.  Okay that isn’t out of the ordinary, but each Wednesday we mail postcards to all new customers from the prior week, this means if you came in on Saturday and purchased from us for the first time you will get a post card on Thursday thanking you.  This isn’t an ordinary post card, it is personalized through variable printing to specifically thank you.

Going above and beyond the Customer’s expectation is simple when you get to face them face-to-face and we excel in your stores at this.  Through our online channel we provide amazing CE, but very little translates over………

Peter Messana is CEO and Co-Owner of ACK.  Part II of his piece, describing how ACK provides incredible ONLINE Customer Experience, will appear on Wednesday, April 4th.

YOUR TRAINING SUCKS! (PART III)

This is the final installment of a three part series. - Suizo

By Tom Hatton, Contributor

My work has often had me traveling around the globe.  That means many nights away from home, in hotels.  Often, after a brutal schedule complete with flight delays, bad weather, other crabby travelers, etc.   Many times, a welcoming person at the front desk makes all the difference in the world.  However, I can say with great certainty, I’ve checked into some very nice properties (with price tags to match) where the person at the front desk literally NEVER looked me in the eye, smiled or welcomed me.  Not once. 

So, would a little remedial customer service training be in order for this kind of person at check-in?  Would THAT make the difference in my guest experience?  Highly doubtful.  Oh, they might get a little better, for a little while.  But I’d say that property is miles ahead of the game if they select people for that job who are warm, friendly, inviting and genuinely care a whole lot more about my guest experience than occupancy ratios and nightly rack rates. 

They exist.  You’ve met them.  They’re the ones you still talk about and remember fondly.  For me, it was arriving at a remote resort 45 minutes after room service quit serving and being visibly disappointed since I’d not gotten dinner on the plane…and later, after I’d gotten settled into my room having that same wonderful young woman deliver to my door a sandwich, salad, soup and a cookie that she’d gone down to the kitchen and prepared herself after she’d clocked out for the day and before she went home. 

Another time and place when getting in so late that the inevitable happened…they’d given away my room and had (literally) no rooms available.  Now, normally when this happens a hotel will “walk” you to another local property and all that entails.  At 2:00 a.m. in the middle of nowhere, though, this prospect is not exactly desirable to a guest.  Without (much) urging on my part, a great and highly professional gentleman came up with this solution for me:  arrange the nicest conference room, equipped (even) with a bathroom, and bring in a rollaway bed, extra blankets and pillows, and even a makeshift TV set up.  And of course, at no charge to me due to the inconvenience.  He even promised (and delivered) a manager’s personal knock on the door in the morning as a personal wake up call, complete with apology (and two newspapers, and breakfast).  

 Seeing the genuine care, effort and efficiency with which these folks so readily ensured my “guest experience” let me know an immutable truth:  they had a natural gift for taking care of others and really enjoyed doing it, even “outside the box”.

Ritz-Carlton is famous for many things.  Not the least of which are their incomparable training programs centered on great service, positive guest experiences and excellence.  They are rightfully held up as best in class, and a model to be copied across virtually any industry on these issues.

All one has to do for proof is stay at any of their properties.  You’ll see everything they incorporate into their training on full display, and done beautifully.  It’s a simple jump, then, to say, “wow, this is because of their fantastic training!”

While this is true enough, I’d propose it isn’t the full picture or the whole story.  The reason those things happen so seamlessly and flawlessly within their own company exceeds just “great training” and “practice what we preach”, I think.  It’s that they select the right people to carry out the mission to begin with.  Great care is taken to pick the ladies and gentlemen who serve their guests and have the natural talent to do so.  Then, and only then, are they armed with world-class training, supportive technology, and appropriate high-end tools to do their work.  Yes, their training is world-class.  But, their true secret sauce is their focus on talent and selection, and is antecedent to that great training. 

Herb Kelleher, founder, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of Southwest Airlines is championed as one of the great leaders of our time.  He built not just a great airline (is that oxymoronic?), but also one of the world’s great service companies.  Great people at Southwest are mostly cited for this, as they inject humor, fun, and customer focus into the typically dreary experience of flying.  When asked how Southwest trains their people so well to be fun, funny and personable…Herb famously replied: “we don’t hire good ticket takers and baggage handlers and train them to be funny and nice, we hire funny and nice people and then train them the mechanics of the job.”

See, Herb had a keen understanding of both talent and selection.  Moreover, what training could and (perhaps more importantly) could not accomplish.

This brings us to the paradoxical truth about training.  It doesn’t work best on those who “need it most” (those with less talent for a particular thing).  It may seem as if they have the “most room to improve” and therefore, will.  Nope.  Training is best, fastest, and most enduring in those folks who already possess a natural talent, adience for, and inclination towards the very thing you’re training.  Think of it this way:  not very good moving to okay.  Is that as exciting as good moving to great?  Or better still, great to world-class?  Doubt you’ll find any examples, by the way, of a jump from not very good to world-class.  Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

So, the next time you get awful service, or a salesperson with whom you’re interacting leaves you with a bad taste or a business and their representatives just continually let you down…don’t fall prey to believing it’s just a training issue. 

And don’t believe it necessarily the “do the right thing” for that employee to try and try and try with them to get them to be “better” either.  Some people, many actually, are simply miscast in their roles.  Some are meant to be heart of the house staffers and others have front of the house talents.  Some thrive on and need interaction with customers and others prefer a quiet cubicle and spreadsheet off in the corner.  One is not more important or better, they’re just differently important.  Helping people find their most natural path to the right one is doing the best thing for them, for your company, and is great leadership exemplified.

Lastly, as you think about training…your own, your company’s, your customer’s…remember to evaluate it fairly and correctly.  If it’s not getting you the juice you’d like, why is that?  It might be easy to quickly turn to content, facilities, or other seemingly “tangible” variables.  Perhaps you think the instructors aren’t up to snuff, or the subject matter stale or misaligned.  I’ve heard things as far reaching as “the lunches weren’t very good” or “the breaks were too short”.  While all those things might be contributing factors, I’d propose you try the counter-intuitive and hard route first:  ask yourself if the right butts are in those seats in the training room, in the first place?  If you can honestly say they’re the best picks for the task, have the most potential to apply the training, and will get the most out of what your training offers them…well, then, your training program doesn’t suck. 

Otherwise, well, you know…

Tom Hatton, HR executive and consultant, is widely recognized as an expert in employee strengths, selection, engagement, and organizational training, development and excellence.  As Senior Principal of The Gallup Organization, his two+ decades of leadership working with the world’s best companies and their most talented employees contributed to numerous ground-breaking and innovative discoveries about workplace excellence, delivered via well-known processes like StrenthsFinder, Q12 and CE11, and books like “First, Break all the Rules” and “How Full is Your Bucket”.  He subsequently joined a client company, Rackspace Hosting, where he held the title of Vice-President of Talent and Organizational Excellence.  Currently writing, speaking, coaching and consulting, he hopes to find another world-class organization with which apply his estimable talent, knowledge and experience about “people”, performance, management and leadership. 

Your Training Sucks! (Part II)

This is part two of a three part series--Suizo

By Tom Hatton, Contributor

About a decade ago, I was asked to evaluate the leadership development program of a highly renowned  $100B international manufacturer.  As you might imagine in a “famous” company of that scale, not many expenses were spared.  A beautifully constructed corporate university building in southern California housed dedicated training facilities.  Three separate classrooms with no less than $1M per room spent on infrastructure.  Five-point cameras.  Every seat position was mic-ed.  Hollywood studio quality glass screens with half-million dollar A/V and recording equipment, per room.  Breakout, observation, and meeting rooms were plentiful and equally appointed.

In addition to the hardware of/for training, no expense was spared on the yearlong development of “content”.  My company and I were part of a consortium of consultants that contributed high-caliber content (that they invested roughly $5M incorporating).   Needless to say, with numbers like these, the investment in building “Leadership Training” was beyond significant, and to my experience, beyond compare.

So, upon the graduation of their first “pledge class” to complete the continuum of four weeklong sessions, delivered over the course of a year, I was asked to give them evaluative feedback on the program. I’d not only helped build it, but keenly observed delivery to this group over the course of that year. 

Company bigshots from around the globe gathered in the executive boardroom and waited for the glowing reviews to pour in.  Whereupon I could not be anything but truthful in sharing with them the same thing I titled this article.  WHAT?

The looks on faces ranged from aghast to anger to astonishment, I’d say.  Now, it’d be easy to dismiss this as “typical consultant-speak” but it was far from that.  No particular effort to be controversial or provocative, on my part.  Rather, meant to observational as opposed to critical.  But in that observation laid an explanation.

Sadly, the group of 25 leaders coming out of the program were barely “better leaders” than when they’d gone in.  Observing them up close and personal in this context (and studying their work in their various company roles) led me to feel very comfortable and confident in that assessment.  Why? Frankly, because they weren’t very good leaders to begin with…they simply lacked real leadership talent.

They’d been chosen as the first group primarily because they were available and not too busy doing much anything else of consequence in the company.  This, in stark contrast to the highly talented men and women really making stuff happen there…who had a hard time finding the time (and, the company felt it could ill afford to sacrifice from the “field”) to attend. 

The punch line, then, was that their training (well, the facilities, content, delivery) was actually world-class, as expected.  However, they had the wrong 25 butts in those chairs.  It was a selection issue and a talent issue, not a training issue. The focus, if you’re not careful, ends up being on the wrong outcome.  All the whiz-bang accoutrements in the world are nice…but isn’t the goal here to produce great(er) leaders?

Therein lie the lesson and the mistake that most managers, leaders and companies make.  Assessing the talent and fit for someone and selecting them into roles (and things like development and training) is key.   This example was very high profile, expensive, and perhaps my favorite.

Sadly, it’s not the only one I’ve come across.  Seems to happen at all levels, in companies everywhere.  The prevailing wisdom seems to be “we can train people to be whatever we need or want them to be”.  Or, the variant we’ve all seen and heard: “If they just try hard enough, they can be anything they want to be or I need them to be”.  Or, even, the Gladwell-esque version (reinforced by Dweck and Colvin and others) that if I put 10,000 hours of practice into something, I can achieve “outlier” status (excellence beyond nearly all others).  None of things are very practical (or true, for that matter).

A regional banking client of mine put a lot of effort behind training tellers.  A teller being the primary interface with customers makes this a vital position in bank branches.  However, rather than purposefully selecting tellers with great people skills who were friendly and welcoming to customers, they believed they could train “anyone” to be/do that part of the job.  They hired folks they considered numerically oriented and who got the technical aspects of banking down cold and set about training the rest. 

They almost got it right.  They thought about “selection” but forgot to select for some of the very most important aspects they expected in the role (and of someone’s natural talent).  In training, they fashioned a 10-point list of to-dos that were printed on a card and laminated for each teller to post at their station.  Number 5 was “smile” and number 8 was “keep eye contact”.  Now, as a customer…does anything feel less genuine to you than watching someone going through a checklist of “how to treat you” and then getting to the one that says smile and then getting that?  You see right through it, right?  It’s almost…insulting!

 (Stay tuned tomorrow for part three of this series)

Tom Hatton, HR executive and consultant, is widely recognized as an expert in employee strengths, selection, engagement, and organizational training, development and excellence.  As Senior Principal of The Gallup Organization, his two+ decades of leadership working with the world’s best companies and their most talented employees contributed to numerous ground-breaking and innovative discoveries about workplace excellence, delivered via well-known processes like StrenthsFinder, Q12 and CE11, and books like “First, Break all the Rules” and “How Full is Your Bucket”.  He subsequently joined a client company, Rackspace Hosting, where he held the title of Vice-President of Talent and Organizational Excellence.  Currently writing, speaking, coaching and consulting, he hopes to find another world-class organization with which apply his estimable talent, knowledge and experience about “people”, performance, management and leadership. 

Your Training Sucks! (Part I)

By Tom Hatton, Contributor

This is the first of a three part series. We will post parts two and three tomorrow and Friday, respectively. - Suizo

Okay, so I’ve got your attention with my pithy and provocative headline.  Now, let me explain…

I’m struck with how many times (hundreds?), through the years, I’ve heard the lament from friends and co-workers about the bad experience they’ve had with someone…with the coda to the story:  “man, that person really needs better TRAINING!”

Really?  REALLY?  Do you think that’ll fix the issue?  More on this as my post unfolds this week…

Topics here on suizoserves.com have touched on service, sales, management and leadership.  And, you can’t cover those areas fully without the inexorably tied notion of “training” within each. 

In my role as leader, executive and consultant, I’ve experienced each of these areas around the globe across myriad industries.  I’ve seen world-renown training programs from the biggest “name” companies we’d all recognize.  I’ve seen off the shelf programs, organically built from scratch versions, and everything in between. I’ve observed some organizations take this so seriously, in fact, that they build corporate universities to administer and deliver to their employees (heck, I’ve even helped build/run some of them).  

Training, in my experience, is neither unimportant, nor cheap.  At Gallup, our research on employee engagement showed “having the opportunity at work to learn and grow” to be vital to one’s attachment to their company/work and a cornerstone of engagement.  During my tenure at Rackspace, we famously invested $3,000 per Racker per year on growth and development.  Not insignificant, either one. 

Surely, then, with that knowledge and investment, companies must do a great job of training.  Right?  Well, not so fast my friends…

As you ponder this introduction, you’re no doubt wondering, “how good is OUR training?”  Well, if you’re not yet, you will be.  Further, I hope you’re contemplating the bigger question:  “what CAN we train, in our people, and what CAN’T we?” 

The next post you’ll see (SuizoServes has conveniently broken up a lengthy rant for you into three highly digestible bite size chunks!) addresses and shares a couple real world examples…that will no doubt ring a bell or two for most of you.  Yeah, admit it, you’re at least a little bit guilty…

And the last post of the week brings it home with some great examples (people, companies, and leaders) that have defied conventional wisdom, swum upstream, and figured this stuff out.  Their training doesn’t suck.  Now, back to yours…

Tom Hatton, HR executive and consultant, is widely recognized as an expert in employee strengths, selection, engagement, and organizational training, development and excellence.  As Senior Principal of The Gallup Organization, his two+ decades of leadership working with the world’s best companies and their most talented employees contributed to numerous ground-breaking and innovative discoveries about workplace excellence, delivered via well-known processes like StrenthsFinder, Q12 and CE11, and books like “First, Break all the Rules” and “How Full is Your Bucket”.  He subsequently joined a client company, Rackspace Hosting, where he held the title of Vice-President of Talent and Organizational Excellence.  Currently writing, speaking, coaching and consulting, he hopes to find another world-class organization with which apply his estimable talent, knowledge and experience about “people”, performance, management and leadership.