An experience to train for (Saturday, 27 August 2011 By Guruvantage Team)
An experience to train for
In our day-to-day lives we come across many role profiles of individuals in their own capacity representing either themselves or their organisations. The petrol pump filler, the gym instructor, the mistree, the flight staff, the cab driver, your own driver there are multifarious roles that individuals and organisations (being reflected by individuals) play in our daily routine/s. It is only by the end of the day when you would reflect upon the days’ hustle over a mug of beer, would there be a recollection of 2 distinct set of memories. The first, typically being the unpleasant experience/s while the latter being the pleasant experience/s of the hours gone by.
Given that in a day we would interact with professionals and our recall would only revolve around this circle of experience. It is even more critical for an entrepreneur as well as an established brand house to be a part of the pleasant memory recall cycle rather than the unpleasant category. While in the midst of all this, and interestingly too, our consumer mind would pay no heed to uneventful experience/s. Flashback to our academic years, the class teachers would typically have a fondness-recall for the bright students and be vary of the brats. She would by-default remember names of the brightest or the slightest of the students while the rest of the mid-stream was inconsequential in anycase! (I had the privilege of being the honorary member of the brat battalion!! – as such was always on the hit-list). A direct derivative following through the above discussion is clearly that mediocrity doesn’t give you an edge over even the worst performer. That is to say that the worst product or person experience will still have an edge over the mediocre consumer experience. You have to strike the same ball differently. As Larry Kersten once put it – “Mediocrity takes a lot less time and most people won’t notice the difference until it’s too late” Read the writing on the wall - Mediocrity just doesn’t pay!!
Most customer interactions today are stereotypical; you walk into a mega-store and get to see flashy product packaging coupled with dead pan sales staff expressions, infact the product-line is even more expressive and impressive than the shop-floor staff! On the contrary, remember that mom-n-pop store by your neighbourhood when you were a kid? Most of us would still remember that kirana shop from where we bought (or rather got) our daily grocery. The smoker fraternity amongst us would by most counts have their favourite cigarette shops already identified and patronised. Most of the lady readers would have their favourite tailor-shops firmly entrenched. While there may be a million reasons for this so-called favouritism, one common factor would be inter-personal user experience. The other note-worthy aspect of this synopsis is that more commonly the above quoted examples are small time entrepreneurs (while their earnings in net values could more than a CEO of a mid-sized firm). It would be worthwhile to condense to the fact that while national or international brands go out of their ways to try and woo the customer by trying to get under his skin, the final thrust comes from the face on the floor.
An impassive and uninterested shop floor could involuntarily push the product brand into the annals of mediocrity and thus, perishable from the consumer brand recall. On the contrary, from the customer stand-point, any out-of-normal experience would facilitate memory cells to register the event as well as the co-related brand – for better or for worse (only to never come back)!! It thus becomes imperative for any product brand to differentiate its experience with the buyer (and hopefully positive). This effort would need the management to concentrate its focus on not only the end-product value but also (and maybe more prominently) the consumer experience value-proposition. In order to keep the product in right perspective, deliberate investments would need to be effected in nurturing the right skill-sets for the customer facing frontline. Organisations need to be more critical of their existing scenarios and find ways of interacting with their customers, while ensuring the last human contact leaves a positive impact in the consumer mind-space. The importance of continuing training needs to address this regard cannot be underplayed.
Here’s hoping to more ‘pleasant’ expressions at the shop floor which would drive the product sales and not the buyer in me!