Brand Maintenance

The following are notes from a presentation about the decline of quality in the brick-and-mortar service industry – while the speech was about restaurant management, the content seems to have direct application to customer experience in any channel or industry.

The speaker cautioned about four warning signs of a company in decline:

1. Employees no longer care about the customers.  When a customer identifies a problem, the employee refuses to acknowledge it or take any action outside of their routine duties to solve it.
2. Maintenance is poor.   There is basic and obvious neglect in the physical environment: peeling wallpaper, a thick coat of dust, dirty or broken furniture, worn-out tableware.  All of this seems superficial, but is significant as a symptom.
3. Commitments are not made or honored.  The company’s basic promises to customers are not being kept.  Customers are stalled or brushed off in hopes they will go away and simply accept that their expectations will not be met.
4. Employees show no initiative and merely follow orders.   Rather than going above and beyond the call of duty to ensure customer satisfaction, employees take a not-my-job attitude and do nothing to address the problems they see.

Each of these are immediately visible to customers, and many of them exasperate or disgust them.  The customers who feel a strong affinity to the brand will complain, in hopes that their experience is an unusual incident, and in hopes that management will take steps to remedy the problem and recover.

Customers who do not feel an affinity for the brand will not complain, but they will also not return to do business with the firm.   Because they do not have experience with the brand, they do not see these minor deficiencies as exceptions to otherwise excellent service quality because they have never experienced excellent service from the brand.   The service, as deficient and unacceptable as it is, is what can be expected of the brand.

The concept of the ”brand halo” suggests that customers will be forgiving, but only for a time.  The halo dims, and the customers forget the way things used to be, or accept that the deficiencies they experience are the new way of things and that is what they can expect from the brand going forward.   So experienced customers become disillusioned customers, and eventually former customers of the brand.

Customer advocacy is briefly mentioned: any customer who advocated for the brand is personally disgraced when a friend or acquaintance takes their recommendation and has a disappointing experience.  If the problem is not amended, the advocate no longer advocates for the brand – and even if the problem is amended, there is reluctance to advocate.  In this way, the poor experience of new customers diminishes the brand equity with established regulars.

When the level of service falls to such a poor level, this creates opportunity for competition to move in and take away customers simply by doing the basic things that your firm should have been doing all along.   This is often the very method by which newcomers and upstarts topple industry giants who have become inattentive and apathetic.

In the end, it’s about maintenance – and maintenance may be unglamorous, but it is critical because the reputation of a brand is not permanent: all the work and money that has been poured into establishing a reputation is wasted if nothing is done to maintain that reputation.

And it is simply a matter of being inattentive: the management of a firm must not be so focused on the new that they neglect to maintain the old.   They must not be so focused on the big things that they let the little things slide.   In the end, a brand can only remain strong by being attentive to the little old things that customers have come to expect of it.

Overthinking and Underthinking

There’s a vending machine in my office that I’ve used at least a thousand times, and only now paid attention to the way the contents are stocked.   Maybe I’m thinking too much about things (a habit I can’t seem to break, but it’s served me well), but the way in which beverages were arranged struck me as the outcome of a conflict of interests in which the wrong interest may have won.

Specifically: this is one of those vending machines in which the bottles are fetched by a mechanical device that carries them to a dispensing slot.  (I’d share a photo, but photography is verboten in the office and twenty minutes on Google failed to produce a satisfactory shot.)    In itself that’s a very clever innovation, as the old machines that dropped the product agitated the content, which can be amusing to anyone who doesn’t get sprayed, but is less amusing to the customer.

But I digress (something of another habit, same disclaimer) …

In particular, I noticed that the merchandise was arranged to put the most popular items (bottled water and name-brand cola) nearest the top, with more unusual items (sports drinks and pineapple soda) nearest the bottom.   Presumably this was done to put the most popular items at eye level, such that a person who approached the machine would see what they most likely wanted right away.

It’s a valid and logical choice from a merchandising perspective, though likely more appropriate to getting attention from passers-by in a pedestrian area than dispensing beverages in an office building (where it might make more sense to put more high-margin items in a more prominent location), but consider the other consequences of this decision:

• In terms of operations planning, it’s likely a poor choice because the mechanical device that fetches the drinks from their shelves must travel furthest for the most popular items, increasing wear and tear on the machines.
• In terms of work design, it’s likewise a poor choice because the serviceman who restocks the machine must bend and twist his body repeatedly to reload the items that most frequently need restocking.
• In terms of quality control, it’s also a poor choice because warm air rises and cold air pools, meaning that the most popular items which rotate quickly are situated in the warmest part of the compartment, and the slow-moving items are kept in a place they would cool more rapidly
• In terms of customer experience, it’s also a poor choice because the buyer must wait longer for the more popular items because the mechanical arm travels further.

So, again, the decision to stock the most popular items at eye level served one purpose (merchandising) but undermined at least four others (sustainable operations, work design, quality control, and customer experience), so I can’t help wondering if this was the right choice.   While I am likely guilty of thinking about this matter far too much, the vending company is likely guilty of thinking about it far too little, which I expect is decidedly worse.