When Accountants Dictate Customer Service, Customers Suffer

I visited a local Jiffy Lube this morning for an oil change. They're quick, efficient, they explain things in easy-to-understand terms, and they offer a veterans discount. I like the way staff interacts personally with customers and how they know, track, and share the history of my vehicle.

Jiffy Lube has a new "greeting policy" that decreases personal interaction and attention. And while it may more efficiently utilize employees, the new policy potentially endangers customers. More on that in a moment. 

Marketers think: "Good place to welcome customers."

Accountants think: "Unnecessary expense."

But first, as a marketer, in addition to creating content that meaningfully, memorably and measurably engages customers, I scrutinize the processes to which our marketing directs customers. 

Before promoting a product or service, I try to understand how, when, and where customers engage with the products or service. The critical mass (energy) produced when content and process collide generates decisions. Some questions I ask colleagues:

• How and where do we meet prospects and customers (digitally or physically)?
• How do we shepherd prospects through the sales funnel (digitally or physically)?
• Where can we enhance our service to make sales more personal and less transactional?
• Are the costs of these enhancements worth our investment of time, treasure, and talent?
  

From this perspective, Jiffy Lube's new policy doesn't improve customer service. In fact, it makes it worse.

In the past, a greeter/worker would welcome you outside, ask the services you want, and escort you inside, handing you off to a team member at the front desk. The new policy has greeters direct customers to check in at a computer inside the work bay. 

Beyond the fact that the work bay is (compared to the inside) dirty, loud, and subjects customers to the weather (hot in summer, cold in winter), it's also potentially dangerous: Oil is slippery, right? Did the bean counters consider how favorably working women in heels or men in dress shoes will view going into a work bay? What about the kids? What do they do while mommy and daddy are checking in? Does Jiffy Lube really want kids messing around in the work bay? 

Customer think: "Dirty."

Accountants think: "Money

I'm thinking the new policy has to be the brainchild of bean counters and profiteers who prioritize staff efficiency over customer service. Sure, checking in customers in the garage keeps staff working on cars and not manning desks. Sure, you'll probably make more money keeping staff busier. 

From a marketing perspective, this move erodes an important (but unquantifiable) customer service and interaction point. But even worse, from a customer's perspective, it's potentially dangerous. 

Suggestion: "Red Carpet Service".

Instead of checking in customers in the garage, install a red AstroTurf carpet from the covered greeting area that leads inside to the service desk. 

A greeter/worker welcomes the customer, and--while genially escorting them inside (perhaps with a branded umbrella in case of inclement weather--asks the services they want. He/she then checks his/her customer in at the computer. This creates a more personal, safer, and seamless customer engagement experience.

A comprehensive national marketing and advertising campaign could promote Jiffy Lube's new "Red Carpet Service" and highlight the services Jiffy Lube already provides: Quick oil change, check/refill fluids, check/refill air in tires, check wipers, etc. Throw in a couple discounts to entice customers to "Experience-Our-Red-Carpet" service.

Seth Godin's Got it Right: All Marketers ARE Liars

I'm currently reading Seth Godin's most recent book on marketing, All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World. Many of you reading this post may know of Godin's work from his previous books, Free Prize Inside!, Permission Marketing, and Purple Cow. Savvy marketers read Godin because we know he is often ahead of the curve regarding imminent developments in our field.

This time, though not ahead of the curve, Godin in his inimitable style captures a concept I've been advocating for years (although unlike Godin I did not write a book about it, and so cannot claim credit!): Stories sell our products and/or services. Stories get our target audience(s) emotionally invested in our products and/or service. Stories motivate and inspire people to buy, donate, support... To do whatever our call to action demands.

But not just any old stories will do. No, Godin says, and I agree, that "in an economy where most people have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories." Throughout the book, Godin uses examples of how stories build or destroy brands.

Whenever I read professional development tomes, I note sections that I believe to be particularly important. I use sticky notes to mark the sections containing these "ah ha" revelations; when I've finished the book I copy the sections into a personal professional development notebook.

I started this practice soon after I left the U.S. Army in 1993, and have since amassed a collection of three completely full looseleaf notebooks. Looking back at some of the stuff from the mid-90s is like taking a walk through a long-forgotten junkyard of management and marketing ideas that were once revolutionary. Remember TQM? I rest my case.

I'd need a separate notebook solely devoted to the revelations I've picked up from Seth Godin--many of which came from reading this book, All Marketers Are Liars. I've never met the guy and he's not paying me for any endorsement. But if you want to get a better understanding of what it will take to be a successful marketing professional in the coming years, here are some excerpts from the book that demand your attention:

1) Page 25: "Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries is one of the most important marketing books ever. And it's a great start. But it's only a start. Positioning, as practiced by most people, is one dimensional. If they are cheap, we're expensive. They are fast, we are slow, and so on...

" ... Most learning about products and services and politicians goes on outside of existing paid marketing channels... Positioning in the world of the story is a longer, subtler, more involved process. It's three dimensional and it goes on forever."

2) Page 55: "... I think the best marketing goes on when you talk to a group that shares a worldview and also talks about it--a community." (Which reiterates the absolute importance of viral marketing. With so many ads and so many marketing messages bombarding us every day, to whom do we turn for trusted information? Our friends, our family, people who tell us believable stories.)

3) Page 80: "Now we know marketing=storytelling, and everything an organization does supports the story. So everyone is in the marketing department and a company either tells a story that people care about, or their story disappears."

"People make decisions big and small based on just one thing: The lie we tell ourselves about what we're about to do."

4) Page 84: "Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires. It's the story, not the good or the service you actually sell, that pleases the customer."

5) Page 111: "We'd like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers."

If you read Godin enough, you know never to stop at the end of his book. Oftentimes the best part is in the appendices, and true to form, Godin hits a few home runs in the additions to All Marketers Are Liars. Here are a few more excerpts:

1) Page 167: "For fifty years, advertising (and the prepackaged, one-way stories that make good advertising) drove our economy. Then media exploded. We went from three channels to five hundred, from no web pages to a billion. At the same time, the number of choices mushroomed. There are more than 100 brands of nationally advertised water... Starbucks offers 19 million different ways to order a beverage.
"In the face of all this choice and clutter, consumers realized that they have quite a bit of power. So advertising stopped working."

The bottom line: Tell a story. Make it authentic and believable. Tell it well. Tell it often. Tell it through a variety of communications mechanisms. Get feedback on your story (is it really believable?!).