“Did you find everything okay?”

It’s a question consumers hear on a daily basis, whether they’re at a grocery store, electronics store, sporting goods store or basically any kind of retail outlet.  Sometimes our answer is ‘yes’ and other times ‘no,’ but what never seems to change is the outcome from this little encounter.  Anyone reading this blog probably already understands why – because it’s not a service question, it’s a marketing statement.

Much like “Welcome!” from greeters at many mega stores, this simple line is meant to project a customer-first attitude amongst a store’s employees (and at no additional cost!,) however, unlike a throwaway greeting, this question represents a much greater missed opportunity.

It is not that the asker (often a cashier) is disingenuous when asking this question, but rather the question itself is problematic and their training does not enable them to deal with the voices of customers they receive.  It is an avenue for feedback, but it almost always leads to a dead end.

The most immediate problem with this question is that it’s vague and open to multiple interpretations by different customers.  One of the main principles of asking good questions is making sure the respondent actually knows what’s being asked.

The first possibility that springs to my mind is, “Was the process of finding specific product groups and making selections easily accomplished?” This can be broken down in at least three ways as follows:

• “Was our inventory organization logical to you?” 
• “Was our inventory accessible to you?”  and 
• “Did we provide enough information to help you decide?”  

There are likely more ways to break down the process of shopping, but it’s worth noting that an online store like Amazon, which has begun to enter the grocery business in some cities, can easily meet these needs without much extra effort through their existing online interface.  This makes it all the more important for today’s brick and mortar grocery stories to satisfy in these areas.

Another way to interpret the question is, “Do we carry the specific items you’re looking for?”  – either by item type or item brand. This is an issue of supply management and no amount of friendly customer service is going to help the customer get what they want on that current trip.

There might, however, be an easy and visible method for customer requisitions, which would not only please a customer but also guarantee a return visit when their item arrives.  This is often possible at electronics stores (although the process is far from visible or easy) but is rarely possible in grocery stores.  When a customer’s favorite brand of mustard or bread goes missing and they ask an employee why they no longer carry that item, they’re often met with an “I don’t know” which is neither helpful nor informative. The excruciating weakness of that response is that it could be!

Even when store representatives ask meaningful questions and their customers provide informative answers, they’re rarely trained with the necessary tools or provided a response channel to turn that voice of customer into helpful information.

Every time the question is asked, a store is in position to receive useful feedback, both positive and negative, yet that information goes nowhere; it gets stuck with a clerk who doesn’t know who to give it to or a manager who doesn’t want to receive it. “Did you find everything okay?” is a façade of customer-first thinking, and fortunately there’re ways to improve it.

An easy start is to ask better questions, and to make sure your representatives know how to respond when the customer's answer is “no.”  A working response channel from customer to representative to management is important, however this is dependent on a customer’s time, mood and memory and may lead to skewed results.

For instance, feedback on message boards tends to occur more when something has gone wrong, rather than when something has gone right.  Questionnaires sent out by grocery stores tend to be focused on their own product or process rather than the customer’s experience (or their desired shopping outcome), and by the time customers receive them, they may not remember all of the relevant details from their shopping encounter.  Furthermore, even if a customer did have difficulty searching through a store’s shelves and a cashier was able to help them, what good would it do if the customer had already waited in line and was about to pay (as they often are when the question is asked)?

For these reasons, going to the gemba is the most effective way to find customers’ needs in order to improve their shopping experience.  True customer-first thinking means discovering if they “found everything okay” (and everything it entails) before they check out of your store.

Ken Mazur

Related Read...

• Trusting Front Line Employees To Be Customer Advocates 

• Translating Voice of Customer into True Customer Needs 

• Electronic Medical Records in the Gemba 

• Service QFD and State-Transition Diagram

Delivering crystal-clear brand identity from end-to-end

"Drunk With Power," an October 14, 2012 New York Times article by Daniel Duane, describes an on-line wine seller named Jon Rimmerman Jon, who earned  his retail cred while at Starbucks. Jon summarizes it as this:

 “the beauty of retail marketing … can be roughly translated as defining a crystal-clear brand identity and then ensuring that everything from the product to customer relations reinforces it."

I like his words, and would like to give them a QFD flavor.

The purpose of modern Blitz QFD^® is to define and prioritize with crystal clarity, that which is most important to the customer, and then ensure that everything from the product to customer relations reinforces it.

Let me explain.

"Crystal clarity" of what matters most to customers. In QFD, this means having a customer need that truly states the value proposition to the customer. Typically, this is the benefit a customer receives from having a problem solved, an opportunity enabled, or image enhanced. It should be independent of the product, its features, and its technology. A Voice of Customer (VOC) statement such as "fits in my pocket" is not a customer need, but rather a fuzzy set of dimensions.

With the Customer Voice table, a Blitz QFD^® tool, you can translate that into true customer needs such as "I can carry with me easily," "Easy to store in my pocket," "Easy to retrieve from my pocket," "Stays in my pocket when I move around," "Does not damage my pocket,"  etc. This helps us understand these true benefits and avoid later design mistakes resulting in "the product falling on floor when I lean over," "the product tearing my pocket off," "the product is too hard to remove from my pocket when I want to get it out quickly," etc.

Crystal clarity means the need statement must be at a sufficient level of detail to be actionable in design, which is typically a tertiary level on a customer needs hierarchy. Abstract expressions such as "convenient" should be deployed to more detail.

Crystal clarity also means that we have accurate priority values. The QFD community replaced the 1960s' ordinal scale weights with AHP-derived ratio scale weights in the mid-1980s, first in Japan and then later in the US. Unfortunately, most English language QFD books and articles were written before this and missed the update. Even today, new QFD texts still cite these early works, and continue the math errors resulting from using ordinal weights in both customer needs and matrix relationships, as well as misuse of matrices including using a House of Quality matrix (HOQ) when it is not needed.

This is why the QFD Institute Green Belt^® and Black Belt^® courses are strongly recommended for professionals in product/service/business development, marketing, design, sigma/lean/DMAIC black belts and so forth. You will learn how to use the modern AHP approach and we provide updated Excel templates. Without AHP clarity, your limited resources risk missing what is truly important and deploying lower priority things.

"Ensuring that everything from product to customer relations reinforces it" is the QFD call for end-to-end quality assurance. Depending on your industry, product, and company, this will vary, but typically describes, end-to-end, the full development, commercialization, and retirement of the product, service, or software. In other words, we must assure that any weakness related to the most important customer needs are made robust. For example, if poor packaging compromises the sterility of a medical supply item, it becomes scrap (let's hope!), wastes money, ruins reputations, could result in injury or death, etc., no matter how well the function and performance of the item was designed.

In classical QFD, each of the design, develop, test, procure, produce, assemble, package, ship, store, sell, support, and other commercialization dimensions has its own matrix. Since the matrix only compares two dimensions at at time, anywhere from four to thirty matrices have been identified in the literature. Maybe in the 1960s-80s, we had enough time and people to analyze these, but that is difficult these days.

In Blitz QFD^®, all these matrices have been replaced for the most part by a single Maximum Value table. One tool goes end-to-end through all the dimensions. How do we do it – with crystal clarity focus on what matters most to customers. This is where we apply our best efforts, first. Makes sense, doesn't it? The Maximum Value table is one of the key tools taught in the QFD Green Belt^® Course and QFD Black Belt^® Course.

Additional training dates will be published at QFD Training & Events Calendar as they become confirmed. Or you can e-mail to us.

Benchmarking – the fatal flaw in modern quality thinking

Frequently we hear in quality conference presentations and papers high praises for benchmarking and "shamelessly stealing" the ideas of others. But does it make sense to take what is successful elsewhere and expect it to work in a different context with different staff and customers? Two recent news reports are noteworthy.

"How Apple Store Seduces You With the Tilt of Its Laptops" (from Forbes Magazine, June 14, 2012): Apple Retail has found that tilting demonstration laptop computer screens at a specific angle encourages customers to adjust them to their ideal viewing angle – and by virtue of touching the computer, invite them to experience the product and its apps in a multi-sensory mode.

"A Store Without a Checkout Counter? JCPenney Presses on with Retail Revolution" (Time Magazine, July 20, 2012): In late July 2012, J.C. Penney (a large American department store chain) announced that by 2014, it will eliminate cash registers and checkout counters at their retail stores. This idea emulates Apple Computer's successful retail store format, also the brainchild of Ron Johnson who left Apple Retail this spring to become CEO of J.C. Penney (JCP). Key functions of the plan are to have store employees with remote scanners roam the store and record purchases and payments, as well as create an iPhone app that allows customers to check themselves out.

Readers who have shopped at an Apple Retail store know that you are surrounded by staff both eager to leave you alone to play with the devices, but instantly there should you have questions or wish to make a purchase. If you use a credit card, you can be immediately checked out right where you stand, and instantly receive your receipt by email. But can a clothing and general merchandise retailer imitate this successfully?

From a QFD perspective, let's examine JCP's decision to emulate Apple as a new solution to an existing problem or opportunity. At the start of a technology-driven QFD project (Apple may have been customer-driven, but benchmarking is usually technology- or solution-driven), we look at the the functions of the technology and what important customer problems does it address?

For example:

• Who are the target customers and how do they shop?
• Do they come in with a purchase already in mind or do they browse?
• Do they buy things from multiple departments and don't mind paying for different purchases in different departments?
• Do they pay with cash?
• Do they add additional items as they walk towards the checkout counter?
• How big a problem is checking out and purchasing at JCP today?
• Do customers abandon their purchases due to waiting in line?
• What other problems do customers face at JCP such as poor selection or size availability?
• How will floor staff handle lost sales when customers that cannot find what they want?

So, when benchmarking another business, be careful to understand the "spirit" and not just the "form."  We talked about this in the QFDI Newsletter "Hoshin Kanri - Understanding the spirit behind the form"

What fits others may need alterations before it fits your business.