3 Signs You Are Losing Customers Due to Confusion
The road to perdition is paved with good intentions and theme parks during spring break. Creating a labyrinth for waiting in line is meant to speed up the queue, not to hide bad service. And there is such a thing as too much of a good thing when advertising ends up hurting sales. The cause is customer confusion.
Customer confusion is bad for retailers. Confusion creates uncertainty, and can easily transform annoyance to anger. In many situations, customer confusion results from the lack of communication between Marketing and Operations, or Corporate and Stores, or Retailers and Customers.
The Harry Potter Blunder: When Marketing is Too Successful
Florida is lovely in the spring and our family diligently travels to Orlando when the out-of-the-country guests arrive in the honored tradition of playing in fantasy land, American-style. With the smaller kids, we go to Disneyland. At puberty, they love Sea World. And as young adults, there is no doubt the family is going to Universal Studios.
In 2013, Universal opened the Harry Potter Exhibit. It came with an advertising blitz and we decided to go. I never imagined the trip would turn into a nightmare.
It took 30 minutes to buy tickets; 10 minutes to lose a member of our party; 55 minutes to find our missing person in the crowd; and 20 minutes to decide we do not want to stand in a very,very long line for bad and expensive food.
Hungry, we battled the crowds as we walked toward the coveted Harry Potter Exhibit. We were thrilled when we spotted a sign saying “20 minute wait”.
Happily we marched forward into the woods only to find later that the sign referred to a waiting line—a second queue before entering the real queue to the exhibit. We spend the next two hours waiting to enter the Harry Potter Exhibit.
Inside the narrow, cobbled street of the exhibit, it was hard to breadth as we were surrounded by people. The first roller coaster showed 150 minutes waiting time. The second line was 180 minutes. We finally found a queue with only 25 people and jumped right in, only to find out the line was for a restaurant. By that point no one wanted to stay.
Bottom line, we drove for four hours, stood in line for four hours, and drove back for four hours. If my family’s response to the late night commercial urging a visit to the Harry Potter is an indication, Universal Studios has lost its luster
Looking back on that day, the good news was -- no kids were harmed.
All day long, we saw employees click counting visitors with clickers. It was obvious the staff was not happy with the endless parade of complaints. I even heard one blurt out that “management does not listen”.
Bad customer experience tends to backfire. The best solution for over-crowding is to find ways to spread the customer flow or speed the queues.
If all fails, it is best to acknowledge and apologize.
The Case of "Hide and Seek": Why Hiding How Long is the Queue is a Bad Idea
Stores located in busy train stations face waves of passengers. This means heavy footfall traffic before and after work and drizzles throughout the day and weekends.
In one such store, a spacious entrance opened up to a gigantic hall leading to the train and subway platforms. Thousands of people file up the walkway, every day, and a quick dash into the store is an enticing proposition.
From the main entrance, a wide pathway leads to the depths of the store, and the checkout area is hidden in the corner of the store. When traffic is slow, the store feels like an empty soccer field. When the store is busy, the checkout can quickly balloon to over 100 customers.
The queue covers most of the checkout area, but floor-to-ceiling concrete columns and six-feet-high displays surround the checkouts.The only portion seen from the main pathway is a narrow entry point.
The long "snake-like" queue has five rows, with a tall display case dissecting the customer’s field of view between the third and fourth bends. Since the queue’s exit point is at the center, the crowded queue and the high display case obscures the field of view from one side to another. Since half of the queue is hidden, customers tend to abandon the line at the half way corner. We dubbed it the Abandon Bend.
The cashier stations are adjunct to the walls and employees face the queue, in a u-shaped format, with 4 tills to the right, 5 tills on the left, and 5 in the center wall. The tall display case in the heart of the queue prevents the shift manager from managing by sight. Effectively, the cashiers work with no supervision.
The sad part of the story is the cacophony was done by intent. The result for the store was high abandon rate, over-staffing, and ghastly customer service.
It took one visit from corporate to listen to the store manager and budget the fix.
