Posts from the ‘customer experience’ Category
Grocery delivery services are an absolute lifesaver when you just don’t have the time to get to the store. It is amazing what you can get delivered to your door: prepared foods that are actually good, meal kits, fresh produce, and anything you need for the pantry.
Early this year, I was living in a different city during the week, and coming home just for the weekend. I was beyond exhausted, from the driving, the working, trying to keep two places in order and living out of a suitcase. During these months, I tried all the online grocery options available to me: Amazon Fresh, Fresh Direct, and Shoprite. They all have their pros and cons, but overall, the state of online grocery shopping is not where it needs to be to make it my go-to during normal times. Not yet.
On the positive side, I no longer have to lug heavy water bottles, dog food or mega packs of paper towels and toilet paper from the grocery store. It’s Amazon Prime, all the way. I am very happy not to have had to visit a pet store in over a year.
Below are my ratings for Amazon Prime, Fresh Direct and Shoprite, across 6 key areas.
The waste factor
Amazon gets the F in this category. My last delivery came in huge insulated totes that were ridiculously under packed, and filled with excessive amounts of padding, cold packs, and dry ice (which burns if you touch it, as I found). It took me over 40 minutes to break the totes down- they are filled with hard sided padded panels to keep them sturdy, as well as bags and bags of dry ice and ice packs, all of which have to go in the sink to melt before you can empty them. When I had completely emptied the bags- my sink was full to the top with these packets. It was a ludicrous amount of waste. And worse, they’d sent an excessive number of totes. Three of them had only a product or two inside- with all that padding and cold packs on top. One had a single bag of frozen peas in it. Another had a bunch of asparagus. In another tote, they’d packed heavy 12 packs of drinks on top of cereal boxes, crushing them. When I called in about this, Amazon said that machines pack the bags, so sometimes the logic is a bit off. I’ll say. Below, a few images of the debris.
After this debacle, I actually called to ask Amazon to cancel my Fresh membership.
Fresh Direct uses cardboard boxes- bulky, but easy enough to break down and recycle. Shoprite gets the A for using regular grocery bags without any excess packaging.
Time slot availability
This is one of my pet peeves with all of them. I learned the hard way to check for delivery slots before spending the time to fill my cart. To achieve true convenience, these services need to make quicker delivery available, and more time slots available in general in the near term. The true convenience would be to realize on Friday or Saturday that I don’t have time to shop, and to be able to get a slot for the next day. In reality- the best case scenario on a Friday is to get a Sunday 8-10pm delivery slot. You really have to think ahead, which isn’t always possible- and if you’re out of food for the weekend, it doesn’t help. On the upside, if you do plan ahead- you can set a time slot by putting anything in your cart ahead of time, and then you’re given until a certain time the night before (11pm with Fresh Direct) to modify the order. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to anticipate running out of time to get to the store. If these services could do same day or next day delivery on demand, that would be the A+.
Produce selection
Fresh Direct was the best on this. I never had to throw anything out. Sometimes I would get something a bit unripe, but it was never too far gone. With both Amazon and Shoprite, I’d actually have to throw things away or call them to get credited for bad produce. Not terrible, most of the time, but not consistently great, either.
Food quality
Aside from produce and meat, for the most part, they’re all good here. Fresh Direct is the one I’m most comfortable ordering meat from, and they have by far the best prepared food options. I wasn’t impressed with Amazon’s- and the options weren’t great- often, the meat wouldn’t be available for the delivery slot. Shoprite’s was consistently ok. I find if I ask for the organic, it’s always best, vs. leaving the choice to them.
Ease of use
Fresh Direct is the clear winner for ease of shopping. The navigation is clear and easy to use, the search is great, and best yet- I can fill my cart with the items from my last order and edit from there. Amazon’s navigation and search were good, but it always took me longer. Shoprite’s was terrible- every time I went to the site, I’d have to work at just finding my local Shoprite location to order from- it never remembered me. And they don’t deliver in my area-they shop, but you have to pick it up.
Customer Service
When something goes wrong- they are all responsive and customer centric- quick to credit you if something wasn’t good or right. Amazon went the extra mile, and put $ in my account as an appeasement when I called to complain about the ridiculous packaging and crushed groceries. The agents were always quick to answer, friendly, and accommodating.
So what’s next?
Ideally, online grocers will scale to accept orders on a shorter delivery window- this is what they need to do to make it a true convenience, and what’s needed to make customers like me return again and again. I don’t trust them to be there for me when I need them, because I can never get the time slot I want. This is the key reason I don’t use them except when I absolutely can’t get to the store. With Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, I’m hopeful they will find a way to deliver locally more easily, directly from Whole Foods- competing with Fresh Direct on quality, and beating them on speed to home. I would also like to see them get more efficient with the packaging. To become my go-to, it can’t be a project to unpack and break down packaging and recycling. I don’t want to create that much waste, and hopefully they don’t either. Online grocery shopping is one of the most amazing conveniences of online retail, but there’s work to be done to get it right.
Everyone’s talking about the death of retail, and what’s next for eCommerce: AI, IOT, and so on. This, combined with today’s more brand agnostic customer, is enough to make a retailer despair. But let’s face it- people are still shopping. Retailers need to up their game to stay in it- and to avoid being eaten alive by Amazon.
While there are so many epic things on the horizon to do- there’s one fundamental opportunity that most online retailers haven’t figured out yet, and hardly anyone is talking about: immediate gratification. The impulse purchase. If we can figure out how to make that easier, faster and better- we’ll have something.
Apple pay is a step in the right direction- it makes it easy to buy from a compelling email in about two seconds. The first part of the impulse buy is there- but I still have to wait for that package to arrive.
Amazon has us all trained to expect 1-2 day delivery on everything. Forget paper towels at the grocery store on Sunday? Amazon can have those to you by Tuesday. Most retailers have followed suit with at least free standard shipping. But anything that takes 3-5 days is like waiting an eternity. I find myself thinking- didn’t I order that WEEKS ago? The new standard is fast. If I could have gone to a store to get it by now, it’s taking too long. But what if I want it today, and don’t have time to go to a store?
Back in the internet boom- Urban Fetch was a great start-up in NYC that would deliver anything within an hour- bagels from your favorite place, the book you need for your daughter’s English class by tomorrow that she forgot to tell you about…a present for a baby shower, etc. It was the best thing ever. But they didn’t survive- it just wasn’t cost effective. It’s surprising in all this time, that no one has figured out how to do this at scale for fashion- it exists for food- Seamless, Instacart, Uber-eats. But not for fashion.
If stores, every major brand, including department stores, could figure out how to deliver same day- within hours, this would create a huge paradigm shift for shoppers. Fashion brands need to be looking at how to facilitate this & stock the stores for it. If I have to go home, and think about it, or wait for it- I might change my mind. Yeah- it’s online in the end, but the stores become local points of distribution.
Everlane has it right: in NYC, they’ll deliver within an hour. BAM. I need a raincoat or a new bag? Instant gratification in 5 minutes of browsing on my phone. But who else? Even with online groceries, I have to set my delivery window 48 hours out (more on that in a future post). The model here has to change.
On a recent trip to the mall, I experienced the worst of mall madness- it was the day before Father’s Day, and it was mobbed. Every store was a mess- like Macy’s the week before Christmas. Even shopping in Nordstrom was so unpleasant, I couldn’t begin to find anything good, because the tables were a mess- it looked so junky and worked-through. I wasn’t shopping for Father’s Day, thankfully- so was able to bail, and just shop online without the stress.
Will people still go to stores? Sure. There will always be those last-minute shoppers, and the delight of discovery- finding something you weren’t looking for & didn’t know you needed ’til you stumbled across it. But stores need to get more creative about making the experience of shopping worth that effort. Burlington, VT is a great example of this- Church street is closed to traffic, and filled with retailers and restaurants- making it a great place to shop, eat, meander and discover. The nearby mall is empty. Malls are becoming a depressing and uninspired destination. But that’s a story lots of others are already telling.
For the time-being, people will continue to be pressed for last-minute shopping, and until online retailers can figure out how to deliver same day, those shoppers are going to the mall.
The car industry hasn’t progressed much online in the past 10 years. In the web-centric universe we live in, there’s a surprisingly high level of disfunction and disconnect in how car dealerships deal with web shoppers.
In a recent car search, I found that dealers treat online inquiries as an exception- the kind of exception that gets lost in the shuffle- with a generic, templated email response that doesn’t answer or acknowledge a very specific request, with follow ups from the general manager saying, “by now, I hope you’ve received the information you’ve requested, and here’s why you should shop at our world-class dealership” (when no info has been sent), and an almost complete inability to get specific questions answered via online or email.
They haven’t figured out how to accommodate the way shoppers want to interact. They’re sharing info with sites like Edmunds, but they’re not able to follow through on requests for information. They desperately need to. It would be so much easier for them to sell cars. And we’d all feel so much better about the experience.
I know I’ll do just about anything to avoid the painful haggling and eviscerating experience of negotiating to buy a car in the dealership. In fact, I won’t even step foot in a dealership without knowing exactly what their prices are & negotiating my deal in advance. By the time I go in to test drive and buy- I already know what I will pay, and who I’ll buy the car from.
Cars.com and Edmunds.com make it relatively easy to research pricing, availability and dealerships within a user-defined area. You can then select the dealers you want quotes from, and can add specific text to specify what you want. The process breaks down at the national and local dealer level. The generic form letters begin. Here’s an example, missing image and all:
You can see how helpful this was. My inquiry was for a specific make and model with specific lease terms and questions about availability. I got an ad for Mazda.
On a national dealer site, there was a click-to-chat window, branded with a specific person’s name who was ready to help me right now. When I clicked it…I got an error message that ‘ended’ the conversation.
The conversations went equally well on the phone. Here, I was a directed shopper- ready to buy. Most dealerships I contacted lost the sale by losing track of the conversation- they all had an ‘internet specialist’, who typically returned the call a day or two later, when I’d already heard from someone else, or pursued and received the info I needed. It’s disappointing that it had to be so hard. On the flip side, It’s an amazing opportunity for dealerships to transform the business model and make this a stellar experience. They’d stand out.
In the end- one dealer stood out- they had what I wanted, and they didn’t waste my time. I wasn’t able to do it fully online- it did take a few calls. But the online screening did finally get me to the right dealer, the right price, and the right car. Painfully.
The point of all of this is- when it comes to having an online presence- don’t do it if you’re not going to do it right. A website is not a set it and forget it. It’s a living, breathing thing- and it will break if you don’t nurture it. You have to be all in. In this case, it looks like the car industry set it about 10 years ago, and hasn’t dealt with it since.
Does having content above the scroll matter anymore? We know that consumers will scroll to see what’s on the page when they’re shopping. But where should we draw the line when it comes to content? What standards should we be following?
Taking a look at a few popular content sites, it seems many publications value highlighting something visually compelling vs. the actual story that consumers are linking to. When a customer is linking from a headline to see a story, should we make them scroll to see what the ‘story’ is about? To even see the headline to confirm they’ve landed where they intended?
Above is the Fast Company homepage- and below, a landing page for a story. Would a consumer landing here have any idea what the lead story is going to be about? Have they given us any incentive to scroll? The key factor to consider when designing landing pages is to provide at minimum:
1. A visual confirmation that I’m landing where I’ve intended.
2. Enough content above the scroll to generate the consumer’s interest and curiosity to keep going.
Interestingly, Fast Company’s mobile experience is much better- I can see the headline above the scroll. This is perfect.
Let’s take a look at TechCrunch. In this case, we have an image that relates specifically to the story (vs. Fast Co’s more esoteric images), and 2+ story leads above the scroll. This may be less dramatic visually- but it gets me to the stories.
Below is the landing page for a specific story on TechCrunch. I can’t see the story, but I do, at least get the headline I clicked on, to validate I’m in the right place.
The key consideration is: what are you trying to do? What do you want the consumer to do when they land on the page? What do you want people to remember you for? If it is about the story, Tech Crunch is doing a better job here. I can at least see the headline that enticed me in the first place.
Fast Company, in designing for online, is making the decision (whether intentional or not), that the photography is the most important thing they want consumers to see. As a consumer, it makes me nuts that I can’t see the story- or even the headline, above the scroll. Not on my laptop, nor my 22″ monitor- though the experience on the iPhone is much better. As a consumer, I like having a meaningful image, but find it irritating when I’ve clicked on a link from Facebook or Linkedin to land on a page where that’s all I see. I clicked because I was interested in the story.
Just give me the story.
There is such a thing as overdoing your video content. When there’s a message I could just as easily (or more easily) scan via text- just give me the text. I can’t even count how many times I’ve clicked on an interesting link from Facebook, Linkedin or news media sites only to find that it’s a video link, and I can’t get to the content of the message unless I’m willing to wait through the ad, then sit through the video.
Video has it’s place- for entertainment, or education. But for news or content, give me text. I don’t want to have to go through it at a video’s pace- I want to see what it’s about and quickly move on.
What’s the best practice?
First, your link or image should clearly show that it’s a video- or you’re misleading me.
Second- provide the text transcript as an option.
Let the user have control over the experience.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you add functionality to your site, you have to know what the customer expectation will be- and deliver on it. Getting it ALMOST right is the same as getting it wrong.
Here’s an example: one day, I was shopping on one of my favorite flash-sale sites- amazing brands and products at unusually great deals. What’s not to love? But there are so many items, and I have limited time and patience. That’s why I was so glad to see a refine-by-size feature that allows me to sort by just the product that would work for me- good! That’s a best practice, especially for a sale in which quantities are limited.
Refine by size feature- a best practice.
The rub? When the refine-by-size feature doesn’t deliver real-time information, it’s worse than having no refinements at all- because you’ve set my expectations for a personalized result, but then let me down on the delivery. Advice? Turn the refinements off until you can get it right. It’s not a value-add if it’s only right sometimes (like a faulty clock: it’s right at LEAST twice a day…).
Refine by size gone bad
I realize there are reasons these things happen- someone made a business decision based on a technical limitation or a tradeoff on site speed vs. accuracy…there are always drivers for things like this. But the bottom line is the customer experience you deliver. If you make a promise (showing a refinement by size)- then you have to deliver on it well or there’s no point. A bad experience actually detracts from the perception of your brand (they don’t deliver!). Customers will bail on your site a lot faster when frustrated with the functionality.
This is just one tiny example of the many decisions brands make every day that impact customer experience. Make sure you understand the impact when you make the business decision. If it’s not worth doing right- it may not be worth doing at all.
Trunk Club is a personalized online shopping service for men.
If you’re a man that hates to shop, struggles with fashion sense, or is extremely limited on time-Trunk Club may be the best thing that ever happened to your wardrobe.
Ready for your next shipment? Just text your Personal Shopper, and you’re done.
Trunk Club is a personalized service that handpicks clothing for you- everything from shirts and jeans, to shoes and belts. The best thing is how the service is designed: It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s tailored to your preferences. Each client is assigned a personal shopper, who will communicate with you as little or as much as you like. You can call, email, text- or even skype. You can specify what you do or don’t want (more black shoes! Only pants…need everything…and so on).
The free service starts with a quick style survey, in which you select your style type (clueless, confident or aficionado), choose from a range of looks and brands that reflect your style, add your measurements- and you’ll be matched with a personal shopper that puts together your first ‘trunk’. The survey takes less than a few minutes.
Shopping just got easier for men: Trunk Club sends you a selection, you choose what to keep.
When you get your trunk, you have 10 days to decide what you want to keep. You can keep it all, or just a portion, and send the rest back.
There are no automatic shipments. You simply call, email or text, when you’re ready for the next shipment.
CEO Brian Spaly started the service because he felt the experience of shopping for most men was too frustrating, overwhelming and time consuming. Before founding Trunk Club, he also founded a company named Bonobos, to create stylish clothing with a superior fit. In solving the problems of fit and shopping, he’s made it easy for men everywhere to avoid the dreaded trip to the mall.
Guys- if you like the idea of never having to shop again, give Trunk Club a try.
ios7 home screen
ios7 was a long time in the making- and a big move for Apple. It’s the first major break from the iconic visual design driven by Steve Jobs and the warm, homey graphics that made the techie device feel familiar: to-do lists that looked like lined paper, a bookshelf that looked like wood, and most importantly, easy to read text, links and buttons.
In this update, the new flattened design takes flat too far. The text is a pretty pale grey and the links a pretty pale blue, making both hard to read. All links are treated equally, so that “skip this step” and “next” links, for example, look exactly the same. The new tool icons are flat and colorless, which combined with the pale blue outlines- make them hard to distinguish. They just don’t pop off the page. The one that’s highlighted is great- if they were all treated that way, they’d seem less diminutive and more actionable.
I like the idea of modernizing the graphics, but this fails in the execution. The graphics are reminiscent of early web design that was less well attuned to customer experience mandates such as legibility, clear calls-to-action and ease of use. The newstand is still a newstand, and I can’t pull my New York Times out of it, so it continues to be two clicks away. The bookshelf design looks like something you might find in a windows app, with books floating on varying shades of blue. The safari icon looks like a compass. And I can’t find the new ‘easier’ to find spotlight search no matter what I do.
The critical issue: The text and link treatments are too pale. Too subtle. These are key elements of the design- and they need to be made legible.
The good stuff:
Swiping up opens the control panel- for easy access to itunes, sleep, airplane, bluetooth, and other modes.
On the upside, ios7 seems stable and has some great new features. The new control panel is fantastic- it puts key functionality one swipe away, instead of multiple clicks- you can now access sleep, do not disturb, airplane mode- and even a flashlight with a quick swipe. Love that.
The camera is noticably better- with easy controls, and more accessible controls for a panoramic shot, square or video.
And the new App scrolling feature is cool- with two clicks, you get mini screens you can scroll through to see what apps are open and click directly in. Very nice.
There’s lots to like about the new OS release. Though I’m not a fan of how far they took the flattened design, I believe it’s easily fixable. The critical need is to fix the oversimplified text and link treatments. I hope that Apple will recognize the need to do this quickly in upcoming releases. The rest is just a matter of taste.
