How much does differentiation matter?

When your job is designing and delivering a product or service to the market it is altogether fitting and expected that you'll take an initial and then periodic view of the competitive landscape for said product or service to see how your offering stacks up in the marketplace, and to attempt to find and exploit perceived weaknesses and differences that (hopefully), present your solutions and services in the most positive light.

It just makes sense, and is typically a fundamental piece of any company's 'go to market' strategy. What is the other guy doing? What features does their product have? Should we build those features too? What does our solution provide that the other guy can't match? And how do we best communicate and reinforce those differences that we 'win' on in the market so that there is no confusion about why our products and services are better?

But sometimes, perhaps more often that we like to think, we focus too much on what our competitors are doing, saying, building, etc.; and not enough on what our current and potential customers are saying and doing with our products. 

Last week I caught a really interesting piece on the Fast Company CoDesign site titled 'Think You're An Industry Leader? Not So Fast', that makes an interesting point - that often as product and service designers and implementers, (and that for the most part is everyone working in Human Resources, recruiting, HR Technology, and so on), that this primary focus on competitors detracts from what should really be our true goals - to understand the customers, to empathize with their problems and challenges, and to build systems and solutions to address their needs primarily.

From the CoDesign piece:

This is the first mistake organizations make when thinking about digital interactions with their customers. They measure themselves against the competition instead of really understanding what their customers actually need.

How can you improve your understanding of customer needs? By connecting with customers more deeply and in ways that move the dialog beyond simple check the box RFP exercises.

Again from CoDesign:

In short, you gain empathy for them, (customers). Great applications are created by those who fully empathize with the user’s needs. Our team must walk a day in the life of the person they are designing for and act as a proxy for the user in the design and integrations processes. I was once asked, “Is there such a thing as a stupid user?” The answer is no; there are only ignorant designers. Any good designer will tell you there’s no such thing as user error -- anything the user can’t figure out is just bad design.

It is not easy, I think, to try and lower your sights against your competition. After all, in most purchase decision processes the customers pick one 'winner', while leaving the also-rans to contemplate the reasons why they did not win the contract and secure the customer's business. Perhaps the first step into really thinking more from the customer's point of view is to frame these kinds of post-mortem discussions less in terms of 'Why Did Company 'X' beat us?' and more in terms of 'What customer problem were we unable to solve?'.

What do you think - would more time being spent on understanding and truly empathizing with your customers and less time worrying about Brand 'X' help your business?

Self-checkouts, Self-service, and Customer Experience

This CNET News article caught my attention last week: Major grocery chain gets rid of self-checkout.

Here is the backstory: Albertsons, a major USA grocery chain has elected to remove the customer self-checkout lanes from its 217 stores.  From the original piece in the Seattle Times that first reported the Albertson's decision:

For Boise-based Albertsons, self-checkout no longer fits with the customer-service experience it wants, spokeswoman Christine Wilcox said.

"Our customers are our highest priority, and we want to provide them with an excellent experience from the time they park their car to when they leave," Wilcox said.

When Albertsons installed self-checkout lanes nearly a decade ago, "it was in response to a growing trend in retail for stores to be even more self-service" than ever before, she said. Albertsons is replacing the self-checkout lanes with regular lanes and opening more staffed lanes during peak shopping hours

A decade ago Albertsons, (and many other retailers, certainly), began to experiment with self-checkout lanes to provide more technically inclined and self-sufficient shoppers with what should have been a more efficient and simple check-out experience compared to the time-tested, (and kind of slow), 'place everything on the conveyor belt, make sure to plop down the little plastic item divider from the guy behind you, and answer a battery of questions from a sometimes too-perky check-out person'. 

'Did you find everything that you were looking for?'

'Do you want paper or plastic?'

'Do you want a bag for your milk?'

And so on.

So to avoid the process, particularly for shoppers with smaller orders, self-checkout lanes started to pop-up in all kinds of retail establishments. They were meant to solve (perceived) customer problems, offer some choices, and certainly shave some costs over time - stores would typically post one service rep to look after several of the self-checkout registers at a time, to assist customers who had issues scanning items, entering payments, and so on.

But as it turns out, most self-checkout experiences in grocery stores kind of stink. The machines are large, more complex than customers want them to be, and the thousands of items that a typical grocery store stocks often present customers and the technology with glitches and issues that eventually do require some assistance from the one service rep assigned to look after the process. Beyond that though, it is quite possible that using the self-checkout machines simply was not a good experience overall for most Albertsons customers, and most were willing to forego the potential time savings and awkward banter with the check-out person to use the traditional check-out process.

Lessons?

Pretty simple I think - implementing systems or imposing technological 'improvements' that exist primarily for the benefit of the service provider and not the customer can't survive indefinitely. Customers, be they the Albertsons shoppers, or the employees of your organization that are the consumers of your HR services and HR Technology solutions, eventually discern the value (or lack thereof), to themselves of whatever fantastic solutions you have developed and deployed.

I know what you're thinking, our Employee and Manager Self-Service solutions are fabulous - everyone just loves using them. We have had them in place for 10 years, and they save a gajillion dollars a year.

But ask yourself this question, if employees and managers had the choice, like Albertsons shoppers have had, to use the supposedly faster, better, modern 'self-service' option, or have their issues and concerns handled the slower, analog, behind-the-times 'old-fashioned' way, what do you think most of them would choose?

Are you really delivering a great solution and customer experience?

Postscript - I hate the self-checkout lane. Except when I get stuck behind someone that decides to pay for thier groceries using an out-of-state check. We really need to do something about those people.