Voices: the CMB Blog

One of the cardinal rules of great customer service is be helpful - even if there's no immediate profit in it. That’s never been truer than today; a customer who feels truly special and cared for has more channels to express themselves than ever before. We hear quite a bit about the power of negative reviews; many companies spend millions trying to recover poorly-served customers, but the positive impact of a happy customer also deserves attention.Case in point, Crate & Barrel has awesome customer service. And now all my friends, and friends of friends, and probably even their friends, know it. I bought 2 glasses from Crate & Barrel a few months ago. One arrived chipped. I called to see about getting it replaced, I was all geared up to argue my case to the representative on the phone. I was ready to try and prove that it arrived chipped, I wanted to make sure she knew that I wasn’t lying about it to get something for free. Of course, I assumed I would have to send it back, so they could see that it was indeed chipped and mark it in some inventory database somewhere, and basically go through a lot of trouble to get my unchipped glass.

The customer service rep didn’t question me at all.  She looked it up in the database, saw that I had ordered the glasses, apologized for one being chipped, and said she would send a replacement out right away. She said as far as the chipped glass goes – I could keep it and use it as a flower vase or throw it out or do whatever I wanted with it. I got the new one 2 days later.  It could not have been easier or more pleasant.

I was so excited about the whole experience that I immediately posted on Facebook about it.

Facebook and Yelp have, of course, helped revolutionize customer service. Before them, a bad experience could be emailed around to friends, talked about at gatherings, you might have even written to the company itself. But these channels only reached so many people. Now, however, through Facebook, Yelp, and countless other online review sites, we can reach thousands of potential customers in one second. We can literally tell the world about our experience, good or bad. This is a pretty powerful motivator for companies to go above and beyond in the customer service department, and we can thank social media for that.  

Jessica is a data manager for CMB’s Technology, e-Commerce, and Medical Devices practice.  She always reads reviews or consults Yelp before buying any new products or services.

Click here to read more of our Customer Experience blogs.

Over the last year I’d heard rumors of a new “super” Walgreens coming to Downtown Boston. To be honest, it sounded a little odd: a Walgreens with a sushi bar? A nail salon? But sure enough, one sunny day in May, a coworker announced the giant Walgreens had finally opened; of course I had to check it out. The moment I opened the doors I was like a kid on Christmas morning—this is not your mother’s Walgreens.

The aisles were brightly lit, and everything was clean and well organized, but what really blew my mind were all the high-end amenities: a juice bar, frozen yogurt bar, fresh sushi, and a pharmacy that looks more like a very nice health center than a regular old pharmacy area.

It’s certainly not how most of us perceive the Walgreens brand; but it’s all part of their efforts to transform the customer experience and they’re doing it in a number of really interesting ways:

An innovative approach to the community pharmacy and health services—Like most drugstores, Walgreens' traditional stores are split between retail and pharmacy/health care services. In the new store model, there is a health and wellness wing, including consultation rooms where pharmacists and other healthcare professionals come out from behind the counter to speak privately with customers. New patient-facing “portals” allow customers to schedule appointments, access information, and share health contacts—empowering customers in the way the old model never has.

Integrating the wellness focus throughout the store—Not surprisingly, Walgreens reimagined pharmacy is getting most of the press, and it’s well-deserved. But I was also struck by how the company highlighted healthier food and beauty options in each department. At first, doing your food shopping at a drugstore sounds both unappealing and unhealthy—all processed food and junk, but if others follow Walgreens lead, that might  change. While the juice and sushi bars might have seemed at best gimmicky, and at worst like a health hazard, the holistic focus on wellness and health means that what might have seemed unimaginable (drugstore sushi?) really starts to make sense. I swear the sashimi was actually good!

Getting mobile—Walgreens' new concept also does a great job leveraging mobile to transform and improve the customer experience across departments. For instance, you can scan your prescription bottle to get a refill. That might seem like a no-brainer in this day and age but how many of us are still calling our pharmacy’s automated hotline?

And hard as it may seem to believe, not everyone just posts all their pictures to Facebook, Walgreens' QuickPrint option lets customers print their pics right from the phone they took them on. It’s a smart move for a company that realizes the drugstore photo lab may not be with us forever.

As Walgreens President and Chief Executive Officer Gregory D. Wasson puts it: “We are taking a multi-pronged approach to delivering the Well Experience. We are combining leading-edge design with enhanced products and services, increased engagement with team members and customers, and an omni-channel approach that blends our brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce and mobile commerce. We are deliberately blurring many retail channels to fit how consumers shop today.”

Bravo Mr. Wasson, bravo.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other benefits are in store for Walgreens customers. But in the meantime, I’ll have plenty to explore at the new, impeccably designed, Super Walgreens. And for all my fellow Bostonians, the next time you need to pick up a birthday card, wine, or health and beauty products, I suggest you make a trip Downtown.

Posted by Stephanie Kimball. Stephanie is CMB’s Marketing Operations Manager and loves any and all sports, the beach, traveling, marketing, good food, and is always down for a movie night. You can follow her on twitter @SKBalls

See how CMB is helping Royal Caribbean measure guest experience and improve customer satisfaction and retention. Click here.

This week, Michael Bauer, a restaurant reviewer in San Francisco, published a letter from a reader about a curious experience a diner had with OpenTable—the popular restaurant reservation and review platform.  It wasn’t a dropped reservation, or glitch in the site, it was something a lot stranger. The letter writer had written a negative, but altogether balanced and reasonable review about an unhygienic dining experience at a popular restaurant, and OpenTable had censored it—in 2013!I’ll admit I’ve heard a few compelling arguments for a moderated/curated review experience, a practiced “Yelper” knows you have to wade through insanely negative, or inordinately positive, reviews to get a real sense of which reviewers to trust. There’s no doubt some filters have appeal, case in point the new app, Find. Eat. Drink., which features reviews exclusively from chefs, bartenders and others in the food industry, not from lowly civilians. But was OpenTable, who responded to Bauer’s questions by saying the review was inappropriate according to their terms of service, out of line? Immersed in the world of Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other sites where the reviews (much less balanced reviews, might I add) flow free, censoring just feels like an anachronism.

OpenTable certainly has every right to moderate reviews as they see fit, but I’d argue they’ve done no one, the restaurant, the customers, nor themselves any favors. For the restaurant, they’ve taken away an opportunity to address a potentially business-altering problem and make it right for the reviewing-customer, who incidentally said the food was quite good. Beyond the reviewing customer, scrubbing the review doesn’t do much for potential customers who could benefit from that information—most of us have learned to filter out the noise of a lone negative review—maybe OpenTable and its restaurant partners need to have a little more faith. And finally, it’s not good for OpenTable, review sites like Yelp, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and countless other platforms let people share their thoughts on businesses with huge audiences. Scrubbing away the negative reviews just negates the experience.

Maybe it’s not just the unnamed restaurant that needs to clean up its act. What do you think?

Judy is VP of CMB's Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

If you're over the age of 25, are childless, and have any idea of what Snapchat is, kudos on your tech hipster status. For those with tweens or teens, you may have been allowed to see a brief glimpse of this world, and maybe some of you have even heard it called a “sexting” app.Don’t we love our flow of both successful and flash-in-the-pan communication tools!  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…and now there’s Snapchat. Will it have the longevity of these household names?  It’s hard to say. But there’s been phenomenal adoption for this app that allows instant communication gratification. One of the key selling points of Snapchat appears to be its “self-destruct” feature.  That is, when you take a picture and send it via Snapchat the recipient has, say, 10 seconds to view it once opened before it, poof, vanishes. The idea is that the communication happens but there’s no record—incriminating or otherwise.

Now, a recipient can take a screen shot of the image (the sender is notified in this case), or if they were so inclined could use another device to take a picture of the image showing on the phone… Whew, that’s a lot of work with 50 million snaps a day already flying around as of last December (for reference, 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day).  

So with Snapchat, users take pictures or videos of themselves or their surroundings and send them (with a message if desired) to a contact. Once viewed, the recipient’s device in theory no longer retains the image.  This purports to alleviate concerns over the public trail left on Twitter or Facebook, and it has already been used for branding. 

A frozen yogurt shop in NYC, 16 Handles, was reportedly the first to use it for an instant couponing program—if a customer was in the right store and the right time they could get an instant coupon to flash to the salesperson for a discount. It was essentially gamification of the mobile social local aspect of the app – adding something fun and interactive. Early this month, Taco Bell joined the action, urging their fans to add them on Snapchat and reintroducing the Beefy Crunch Taco via the app.

How can other brands use this app to help manage and measure customer experiences? Much like Google Surveys says you can ask a whole survey worth of questions, pieced together one question per respondent at a time, to make the whole picture, instant messaging apps could be used to piece together a more holistic picture of how customers experience and interact with a brand.

Or, shh, what about Whisper—another app phenomenon that recently got $3m in start-up funding. This one allows anonymous posting of secrets. It’s not the first idea of its kind, but it is apparently heavily moderated—good. And here’s where the generation gap really kicks in. Whisper users need this app on a psychosocial level because they have pressure to live such curated lives on Facebook. Living up to the self-brand they create is too much. Whisper is supposedly an outlet for being “real.”

That sounds even more like something that could be a source plumbed for customer experience insights, although their terms and conditions currently say clearly that you may not use the site to mine data. What about a Whisper business account that asked consumers what they secretly do, or wish they could do, with their next vacation, car rental, computer purchase, etc.?

It’s conceivable that the future could be mapped through compiling many blips of information into a coherent story. It is big data of a whole different kind. Yet, a word to the wise: there will always be newer and cleverer platforms, apps, or gadgets to let you connect with customers, but you still need to know your audience’s wants and needs—that’s been the same for centuries!

Kate is a Project Director, working with clients across many industries at CMB. She has been known to perform in local musical theater here and there, speaks three languages well and a few others passably, and loves coincidence.

Click here to read our 2013 Consumer Pulse-The Mobile Moment: Barriers and Opportunities for Mobile Wallet

Originally published in Loyalty360

Most travel and hospitality brands are laser-focused on engaging guests while they’re on-property.  And it makes sense, doesn't it? Guests are right there, in reach, interacting in-person with the brand and staff. But the customer’s experience doesn’t begin and end at the door, so how else can travel and hospitality companies engage their leisure customers?  

One idea is to better leverage mobile technology to engage guests, pre-trip. Today, more than half of Americans over 18 own a smartphone, one-in-four own a tablet, and seven-in-ten access social media sites on their mobile device daily.  How do you leverage this platform from the first moment your future guests dream of a trip to when they show up at your front desk?  Here are some ideas to drive engagement in those all-important early stages of the customer journey:Dreaming

The first stage of the travel process involves planting a seed about a travel occasion or destination and encouraging potential travelers to begin daydreaming: get them to think about their upcoming 10^th wedding anniversary, remind them they need to plan a summer vacation or encourage them to check an item off their “bucket list.” 

Learn what inspires your guests and then get to work encouraging them to daydream. The greater understanding you have of your customers and the reasons they stay with you for their leisure trips, the more you can do to motivate them to travel –and stay with you instead of someone else.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• Watch the weather: If you’re selling tropical vacations and you see a blizzard hitting the Midwest, create a contest and ask people to upload photos of themselves (using the camera of their smartphone) wearing a sun hat or drinking a tropical drink to your Facebook page.

• Pin it: Ensure your destination is building traction on global sites (e.g., Pinterest, Wanderfly) where travelers are creating dreams for future trips– and ensure they include your pictures in their dreams. 

• Drive the next trip: Hotels, tour companies, and cruise lines can create a shopping cart like "wishlist" on their site. Knowing where someone wants to travel, companies can send fun trivia, photos, tips and offers targeted to that person.

Planning

So, now that the traveler is dreaming about taking a vacation, you’ve got to make sure that your mobile strategies help them cut through the clutter and connect with your property.  

Mobile devices are portable, “pocket travel agents,” offering instant access to airfare prices, contact information, flight schedules, and bookings. According to comScore, 37% of US consumers accessed travel sites or apps from their smartphone in July 2012. Activities for the mobile traveler include reading reviews, comparing prices, and booking rooms but there are lots of ways to think about supporting your guest’s planning activities. 

Here are a couple of ideas:

• It’s always a huge bummer to find out that a must-see restaurant is closed for renovations. When you’re travelling, up to the minute information is one of the most vital things a traveler can have. Help future guests identify activities of interest by encouraging them to download the Mobile City Guide from Trip Advisor. They’re convenient, easily accessible, and most importantly updated in real time. They include reviews, suggested itineraries, and tips all synched with the site’s content. An added bonus? The downloadable walking tours that don’t require an internet connection, because despite the wonders of mobile, we could all do without the roaming charges! 

• Smartphones and tablets make it a lot easier for travelers to find and plan their trips, but the flip side is that a website not designed for smartphones and tablets, looks out of touch, and more importantly it’s not convenient OR useful. Take a look at Jet Blue’s awesome mobile app. From mobile booking, mobile boarding passes, terminal maps, to a really easy to use interface —Jet Blue’s app doesn’t just meet customers planning needs, it offers flyers things features clients didn’t even know they could live without. 

Booking

So we know connected travelers are using their smartphone to gather travel-related information, and the trends are on the rise for bookings by mobile device. While today, mobile booking might fall behind other activities, you can bet it won’t for long. This is especially true for last-minute bookers—according to a Business Insider report, more 70% of mobile reservations are done within 24 hours of the planned stay.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• There’s a reason Hilton Hotels is one of the most popular hotels for booking on a tablet. Hilton has had a mobile booking app since 2009. One of the reasons it’s so popular? It loads quickly, it’s easily searchable, and it links to their HHonors rewards program. As busy travelers, looking to book a room in a hurry, synching to rewards reduces a ton of hassle. DoubleTree, a member of the Hilton family, does a terrific job of with their pre-stay out-reach, and it looks great on the phone of course—reminding travelers of the hotel’s address, that they can pre-order amenities, and that a warm chocolate cookie awaits—delightful!

• If you’ve ever looked on Fab.com, or any of the other dozens (hundreds) of flash-sale sites, you know their appeal—a major discount available for often just a few minutes. Turns out that kind of deal appeals to the spontaneous traveler as well. For example Priceline’s Tonight-Only Deals feature spurred last minute bookings(made after 5pm), for hotels where many rooms might have gone unfilled.

Mobile technology is a revolutionary tool for inspiring, transacting with, and above all engaging your guests with your brand – all before they come through the front door. There are plenty of tools available today – and more coming down the pike – to help you help your guests to have a memorable experience at your property – one they’ll want to rave about to family and friends.

The first steps? Reach out to your customers to find out what inspires them to visit your property – what goals they are trying to achieve. Then find some mobile tools that you can offer to help them achieve their goals when they visit. Don’t wait to build strong engagement with your future guest!

Judy is VP of CMB's Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

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