Marketing Now

HOW TO LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

HOW TO LISTEN

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

I am writing from a megasized hotel room in Nashville, where its operators are known as the best in the business. As luck would have it, we have speaking engagements in three of their company properties this week. So it is interesting to see if they are a learning corporation or stuck on one idea (albeit a very good one).

If you imagined me sitting at the desk in my hotel room quietly tapping away while Buns burns through yet another mystery novel, you would be half right. Buns is reading one of her omnipresent paperbacks, and I am in one corner, quietly attending to the writing business. But I am not sitting at the desk, because, as usual, the hotel room desks are ordered by a designer who thinks long and hard about the fabric on the chair but not one iota about how the chair will actually be used. I’m a fairly tall guy, but darned if I don’t start singing à la Carlos Santana every time I sit at a hotel room desk: “All my friends write a little lower. Low writers, write a little slower.” (A good play on words, don’t you think?)

Desk chairs in hotels are about five inches too short. Once some tubby guy gets through cranking on the seat or pushing through the chair bottom, the keyboard of my computer hits me chest-high, making it impossible to use the desk for long.

Buns is up for another round of tweezing her brows at the magnifying mirror we affectionately refer to as her searchlight. But could she open the closet door to retrieve her makeup kit? Sure, but not until the bathroom door was closed. You would think that this hotel company, after making the same mistake over a few thousand rooms at another location, would figure it out. But the door arrangement in this hotel is exactly the same in their latest edition.

What’s my point? If you ask the wrong questions, you are no better off than asking none at all.

My appendix fell out late one Friday afternoon. By Monday, stoicism no longer sufficed. Buns hauled me to the doctor who enrolled me in a special Appendectomy 101 course. I passed the time marveling at the number of fast-food deliveries that made it past the nurses, wondering how I could get in on the action. No one, except for the few too weak to defend themselves, even attempted to eat the godawful mess that passed as food.

By midweek, I was ready to climb the hospital walls, when there was a polite tapping on the door frame to my room.

“Come in!”

“Mr. Gross?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from the food service department, and I would like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Shoot.” At least I had company.

“Are you getting served three times a day?”

“As regular as a clock.”

“Is the hot food hot and the cold food cold?”

“No problem.”

“Are you able to chew your food?”

“It was my appendix that they overhauled. My chewer is working just fine.”

The sprite with the tiny voice and even smaller smile, carefully closed her notebook, stood quickly, smoothed her skirt, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Gross. We appreciate your input.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Yes, sir?” The voice was a combination of puzzlement and concern. “Don’t you want to know how this stuff tastes?”

She opened her notebook, studied it in a glance, and looking pleased with herself, attempted to stand tall on the side of efficiency and all things corporate, saying, “No, sir! That’s not one of our questions.”

“Well, sit down and take a note!”

She grabbed a pen, opened her notebook, and started to write even before I launched-probably something to the effect of “Do not include psychiatric patients in future surveys!”

“Miss, if the food tastes like used shortening, it doesn’t matter if it is delivered on time or that the hot food is hot and the cold food is cold. It doesn’t matter if you can chew it, if after the first day you have figured out that it’s not fit for man or beast. And, of course, the portions will be large enough. In fact, any of this mess is plenty if not too much! If I were colorblind, I would have no way telling this stuff apart. To me it’s either red stuff or green stuff, neither of which I will put in my body.

“Write that down, please.”

And I never saw her again. If you don’t ask the right question, you cannot get the right answer!

You Have to Ask the Right Question …

… if you want to be certain you get the right answer.

It’s almost a famous story, repeated so many times that I am beginning to think it as urban legend. The story is about the marketing director of a large hotel in downtown Chicago who marched into her boss’s office and announced that according to her surveys nearly 100 percent of hotel guests would appreciate having a small television in the bathroom.

What she had failed to do was to ask the right question: “Would you be willing to pay an additional fee to have a television in your bathroom?” On resurveying the same crowd that reported they would appre- ciate a bathroom TV, almost none would actually be willing to pay for the privilege. But what they would pay for would be a full-size ironing board with a home-style steam iron!

The Peabody Hotel in Orlando is one hotel I know of that has bath- room television. For some oddball reason-maybe it was lack of space, maybe the bathroom television was an afterthought-the small television is mounted right behind the commode. (Duh!)

While you were reading, Buns and I skipped out for a breath of fresh air. After all, even old people should have things to do on a Saturday night. So we walked and dipped two straws into a so-so vanilla shake before calling an end to our hot date. I’m back in the chair. She is ironing, pretty much in the dark. You see, the hotel is apparently on an energy kick, and though the sentiment is at the very least admirable, they may have taken it too far.

The light in the entryway to our room, the only place near to a plug and big enough for the task, must be all of 25 watts. That’s fine to keep you from falling over luggage but impossible for creasing a shirtsleeve. I would have sat in the single, comfortable chair in the room (there must be a rule about two guests sitting at once), but someone, probably the energy czar, had removed the reading lamp. So, with two in a room, you can f lip for the chair, and the winner is left in the dark.

This is not an inexpensive hotel. And I can prove it. The little light on the room telephone is f lashing. I know what will happen if I give in to its call. “You are using XX Mail (like I care what brand of torture they are using).” What follows is a tutorial on how to customize your mailbox. Okay, let’s see a show of hands, please, for all of you folks who person- alize your hotel room voice message. I see . . . oh, there are two of you! Everyone who doesn’t want to chance missing an important message will stand, luggage in hand, bent over the telephone and cringing through another tutorial. Why? Because you know that at the very end of the recording, there may be messages, or at least one message, and chances are it’s from someone claiming to be a member of the management team reading in monotone from a script suggesting that you call if there is anything they can do to make your stay a pleasant one. As a matter of fact, there is! Put a button on my phone that lets me go straight to my messages without the tutorial. And while you are at it, stop calling my room with insincere drivel!

At the end of the message, we learn that we can “press 7 to clean up your messages.” So I pressed 7.

“If you wish to delete your messages, press 1.” And I pressed 1. “If you are certain you wish to delete all of your messages, press 1 to confirm.”

I pressed 1, already, you idiots!

One last shot and I’ll leave the hotel boys alone. I have a dollar that says if I walk over to the bed and pull the covers back the top and bottom sheets will be tucked in together. It’s an efficiency trick that makes dress- ing the bed faster since you handle both sheets at once. Yep, I was right. I pulled back the cover and undressed the bed all in one quick swoop. Now here’s the key point. Most of these tiny assaults on customers go unnoticed by the customers, at least consciously. I have the sneaking suspicion that these tiny insults-we call them microinsults-although they never actually show on the radar, are nevertheless noticed by customers, on some level.

We stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Orlando a few weeks ago. The Ritz pretty much sets the standard when it comes to customer service. But even the Ritz has its “duh” moments. When we walked into our room, we actually said, “Wow!” The room was perfect, the view was delightful, every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. The bed was a monument to com- fort, piled high with a rich down-filled duvet.

Wait a minute! Did I say Ritz Carlton in Orlando? As in Florida? With a heavy duvet?

In Florida you don’t need bed covers from the Alps. You need air conditioning. The only way we could be comfortable under that luscious pile of indulgence was to crank the AC to the bottom of the scale. And we couldn’t bring ourselves to waste the energy required to ice up the room just so we could snuggle under the covers.

Unless you get your customers to talk, you may, with the best of in- tentions, be creating a microinsult. And I’ll bet that the Ritz has yet to have a complaint about those wonderful beds. Still, unconsciously, someone may have felt just a twinge of guilt using the AC to turn their room into a meat locker!

You probably have never paid much attention to the snap-on caps on the shampoo bottles that make them near impossible to take home. You are probably used to removing a promotional card for breakfast from your pillow. You’ve learned to tolerate the room desk being unusable until the room service menu and the note from the housekeeper hinting for a tip are cleared.

But you will notice now. And when you peel back the covers, you’re going to make a conscious decision about which company is really putting you first.

Microinsults rarely result in a complaint or even get a mention in casual conversation. But the customer is watching, recording, and deciding who is and who is not really on their side. So think about it. How do your customers perceive you, unconsciously?

I’ll Say It Again …

If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer! Too many customer-response systems force the customer to answer questions that aren’t burning issues with the customer. If you would like to find out what your customers think about the new store layout, it is perfectly fine to ask-and you should! But consider that the new store layout may not be an issue with the customer. Read on to see what one surveyed customer revealed:

… dirty bathrooms and no toilet paper in the stalls, toilet seats that are broken, and doors that have locks that are not working. One bathroom in particular has only one stall for the whole store and the latch is nonexistent. You need to bring tis- sue from home if you are planning to shop there. (Unfortu- nately, this store is close to my home, and I can walk there for my prescriptions.)

To use the bathroom you need to improvise and use the large green trash can to put in front of the door and hope that a lady who doesn’t already know the situation doesn’t barge in and catch you in a compromising position. So usually I have to yell, “There’s someone in here!!” A voice from behind the door will respond, “OK,” then I usually tell them about the garbage can doorstop.

Of course, after that I feel like my hands need to be auto- claved for germs because they don’t have soap and the hand dryer blows only cold air.

Asking a lady who has just escaped a filthy toilet stall about her feelings for a new store layout isn’t going to produce the most valuable in- sight. Ask the questions that are of interest to you, but always invite the customer to comment on issues that are important to him or her. On the other hand, it’s too easy to ask the obvious question. Unfortunately, the obvious question is not always likely to produce the information you really need. For example, say you want to create a local marketing campaign and use direct mail. The easiest thing to do is look at your customer database, determine the area from which you draw the bulk of your customers, and target that area for a mail drop. But unless you also compare addresses with purchases, you may miss the fact that your highest-profit customers actually live in a different part of town. It may be more profitable to focus your marketing dollars differently. But you won’t know unless you ask the right question.

Pay Attention to Language

It’s easy to assume you have asked the right question, when in fact you are way off the mark. What happens if you ask, “Which store do you think is best for customer service?” That question yields an entirely different data set than, “Of the stores you shop most often, which gives the best customer service?” And that question is entirely different from, “Have you ever changed stores because of poor customer service?” or even, “Have you ever switched to a new store because of its reputation for great customer service?”

Source: T. Scott Gross, “When Customers Talk… Turn What They Tell You into Sales,” Dearborn Trade Publishing, Chicago, 2005

Republished by Marketing Now

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