Mourn the death of analogue businesses; don’t listen to their customers. Nostalgia isn't an insight.
I think humans are important in businesses. I think human-to-human contact is a wonderful way to build relationships with customers. I think humans can do things that digital can’t. I think humans and technology working together can do amazing things that could not be done before. Humans are good.
The trap is we overstate the role of the humans not least because we make the mistake of listening to customers and they overstate the value they place on analogue channels. Because they are customers and they are saying what we want to hear we over-index on the apparent insight this gives us.
This is an opinion piece on LinkedIn it's not a peer-reviewed publication in HBR.
Every time a high street retailer passes away there is a faux outpouring of grief about how they’ll be missed. Usually an older person in a market town talking to camera about how it’s part of the high street or how people like buying [whatever] face-to-face or I always went there for [one narrow category the brand was famous for].
The products and services obviously weren’t attractive enough to keep their business models going though. I appreciate it’s not always the proposition that’s wrong. Take Thomas Cook: it is possible that there is a sufficient addressable audience who want to book holidays face-to-face on the high street and that their problem was the £1.7b+ of debt (I don’t know much about corporate finance but that sounds like a lot). The Hays folk run a successful business and they see an opportunity there.
The decline of the high street has material social and human implications. That's not the discussion here. My point is that these situations remind me how dangerous listening to customers can be if you don’t also observe what they actually do and pose alternative, potentially better solutions for them to respond to.
Mary Schmich said in her Baz Luhrmann immortalised 1997 Chicago Tribune column:
“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
Here are the ugly parts.
Everyone loves the familiar; until they experience something better. Then that becomes familiar. [Repeat]
Consumers exhibit confirmation bias: The tendency to rationalise and seek reinforcement for their current behaviours. Or, more confusingly for research purposes, previous behaviours even when they’ve themselves stopped behaving that way.
Conversation with relative:
“I like going to a store to buy things like washing machines – you need to see it and talk to someone about it. And if you need it delivered and installed then you are best buying it from a local store who fit them. He’s had a shop in town for years we’d hate to see it close…
[and without a hint of irony]
…we did just replace our washing machine with ao.com though. We were in a hurry before we went on holiday and they delivered the next day, installed it and took the old one away.”
This is exactly the sort of narrative that is confusing strategies made worse because most customers don’t add the last sentence above.
[Note - All washing machines are white metal boxes with a round glass door on the front and the person in the store most likely hasn’t used the actual machine you want to buy, if they’ve ever used any of them.]
Open your mind to customers finding better solutions or their needs changing:
This whole ‘older customers like doing it the old way’ conversation drives me insane; it’s lazy thinking, it’s not true and it’s disrespectful. Spend ten minutes observing the 70+ generation in a coffee shop and you’ll see the Wifi passphrase is just as important to them; they are all about social media and life experiences.
Customer don’t choose channels, they choose solutions. Older customers, more considered customers, might adopt later because the novelty of the new-fangled ways isn’t enough of a draw in itself. But when they find new, better solutions then that’s how they do things.
Most analogue experiences don’t deliver on the analogue promise.
By analogue here I mean face-to-face, stores (and other bricks-and-mortar) and telephone calls. I get digital blends and blurs all of these but I’m talking here about overstating the old-school in that mix.
Customers absolutely have needs for which analogue instinctively seems to answer, but it often isn’t because we can no longer afford the cost and complexity of maintaining the good analogue things (if they were ever as good as our nostalgia tells us they were.)
Examples:
I’d like to buy a new Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (I think) – I’d like to have someone who really understand my needs and the range to help me, and perhaps to suggest some alternatives. And tell me if my Surface Pro 3 accessories will still work. Where am I going to find that?
I’d like to speak to someone who has been to the hotel I want to stay at – I’d like to understand if the road it is next to in the pictures is very busy. Where am I going to find that?
I’d like to buy from a physical place because then I know when it goes wrong there is somewhere I can go back to and complain/get my money back. Where am I going to find that?
I’d need to make a health insurance claim – I’d like to only talk to one person, if at all, because it’s a bit embarrassing and all I really want to do is see a consultant tomorrow. Where am I going to find that?
I’d want to book a taxi to collect me right now and get me to my meeting – I’d like to know exactly when it will be here, when I will arrive, and how much it will cost. Where am I going to find that?
A well-informed, high-service individual might be able to offer me some of those things, but they are few and far between, too expensive to own, and even the best people can’t do uniquely digital things – no phone and radio juggling taxi dispatcher can be Uber.
Those claims and rationales that you want to offer about your humans and stores: Are they true? Can I afford for them to be true at scale? And for those customers who always want the old way – are you designing your analogue solutions for them? And again, can you afford to do so?
“Failure demand” of your product, service or digital channels is not a positive reason for an analogue engagement!*
If the customer really has a genuine underlying human-to-human need then that’s great – service it that way. It they are calling or visiting because they need more information or had some questions or wanted to talk to someone or was on your website and couldn’t… - these are not underlying human needs. They are failure demand arising from a digital experience that didn’t work or a failure in the product itself.
Go and look at your call centre root causes and ask yourself how much of this arises from poor digital execution or a defect/complexity in the product or service.
Any advice?
I feel the need to offer a numbered list of advice. I’ll develop that another time because right now I’m really just reacting to Thomas Cook vox pops. My advice to which would be:
1. Don’t listen to a word your customers say. Observe them. Involve them.
2. Use humans to only do uniquely human things. Digitise everything else.
3. Make sure your humans are good at their job. If not then digitise them. (See above.)
4. Stop saying omnichannel (or anything channel). It’s a coping strategy, not a strategy.
5. Be open-minded. Is it possible that what you do today could be made irrelevant?
6. Be uniquely digital. Digitising how you used to do it won’t be enough.
7. Ask for help from consultants. (This is what happens when I’m allowed to publish directly.)
And, yes of course
8. Give the humans good tools to make them better but all of the above still applies. If a human can operate a tablet app, maybe the customer could too?
* I try to limit myself to one exclamation mark a month across all communications. So that tells you how important I think that observation is.