Remove friction to win tomorrow’s customers
As a kid, I loved getting the Service Merchandise catalog. I grew up in the ‘80s, and getting a department store catalog in the mail was an event. My sister and I had to work out a system to share the one precious catalog in our house. We’d both mark it up and make our Christmas wish list. Then we’d go to the store to look at the toys to see how they worked.
Service Merchandise stores were a catalog showroom. You could find most of the stuff from their catalog in their store setup for demonstration. When you were ready to buy something, you didn’t add it to your cart. There were no carts. You took the item info and used that to check out with a cashier. Your cashier would call back to the stockroom, and the stuff you ordered would come out on a conveyor belt.
I loved to watch the conveyor belt to see what other people were buying.
I thought of Service Merchandise a couple of weeks ago when I saw a tweet from Neil Gaiman about a bookstore in the UK called Foyles. In a piece from 1992, Gaiman mentioned that Foyles was one of London’s most irritating bookshops. He described the book buying process like this:
Think about how this would’ve worked. You’ve sorted through a sea of books and found the one you want to buy. From wherever you are standing you need to walk your book over to a desk to get a purchase order. Once you have your purchase order, you have to pay for your book. The purchase desk is on the other side of the store, and now you’re walking across the store towards that desk to pay. There’s a line to pay for books. The person in front of you needs to pay with a check. Finally, it’s your turn to pay. You hand over your purchase order and pull out your wallet, decide which card to use, and swipe it. Your card doesn’t work on the first try. You look and realize the mag reader is only on one side, you flip your card over, and your transaction starts processing. Excellent, now you’ve paid and need to take your receipt back to the first desk. Once you get there, you show your receipt and collect your book to take it home.
A book would have to be amazing to get you to jump through those hoops.
Going through these steps to buy a book feels like ancient history in a world where almost 130 million* people can order something on Amazon and have it on their doorstep in under two hours.
*Based on the population of metro areas served by Amazon Prime Now as reported by WolframAlpha.
Make customers feel like they are in the future
When you remove barriers for customers, it changes patterns of how and when they buy. Need some spaghetti sauce for dinner? You can go out of your way to stop and pick some up on the way home, or you can order it from Amazon before you leave the office and have it waiting on your doorstep when you get home.
You need to create systems so customers can save time and the mental energy of having to run cost/benefit analysis in their head. Our goal should be to free them to get what they need and move on.
Think about checking into a hotel. You’ve made a reservation and the hotel knows you’re coming. Why do you have to wait in line to talk to someone to get your key? I love to take my family to Disney World and checking in used to be the pits. Waiting in line for an attraction is one thing. Waiting in line to get into our room after an 8+ hour drive with two kids is not fun. They are bouncing off the walls and ready to see Mickey Mouse, not sit in a lobby and wait to check-in.
The entire check-in process all changed a couple of years ago when I could check-in online before we left home. Disney mails us our hotel keys on Magic Bands. These are RF bracelets that include our hotel keys, park tickets, and other relevant info. Now we can drop our bags off at the hotel and go do whatever we want. Everything we need to start our vacation is on our Magic Band.
The Magic Brand is great, but it’s still a passive tool. Imagine if you could use a similar tool to create an active experience with voice automation. Ask it for dinner reservations. It remembers how many people are in your room and that you’re going to an event later that night. Need your car? You can find a house phone or wait at the valet stand. Or you could pull out your phone by the pool and ask for your car to be ready in twenty minutes.
Voice automation isn't new, but voice interaction in our homes and our pockets offer exciting opportunities to create these kinds of experiences. Last year, we launched Google Assistant on the Assist platform. One of the first experiences we built connected 1-800-Flowers to make it simple to use the Google Assistant to order flowers with your voice. Here's how it works.
The process of ordering flowers has evolved quickly over the last 50 years. The first evolution happened when you could pick up the phone and buy flowers. Before the telephone, you had to walk into a shop and make your order. Calling was more convenient than walking to the store, but you might have to wait on the phone.
As convenient as ordering on the phone could be, you couldn't even see the flowers you were buying. When the web came around ordering flowers changed again. You could skip the hold time and see your flowers, but you had to set up an account with your shipping info and manage your payment data.
Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant take ordering flowers to the next step. No hold times. You can use payment info you keep on file with Facebook or Google.
Now when you want to order flowers for someone all you need is a few minutes and your phone. You can talk to Google Assistant just like you would to someone in your local flower shop, and you're done in minutes without having to pull out your credit card.
Automation takes commitment
Automation isn’t a cure-all for friction in your sales cycle. You can’t set up an automated conversation workflow one day and never think about it again. What you build today is a starting point and should help you discover what you’ll need to improve tomorrow. Your conversational layer should fully integrate with your website, phone, and support infrastructure.
In a world where the home button of every phone in the world is one phrase away from your entire brand experience, a lot is going to change. “Let me talk to…” “Hey Siri” and “Alexa, …” is going to change everything we think about how we talk to brands.
Assist is the chatbot platform for the enterprise. We power Sephora, Fandango, Hyatt, 1–800-Flowers and more on Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs and Amazon Alexa. If you are interested in automated solutions for messaging or voice, please send us a note: hi@assi.st. Learn more about Assist here: http://assi.st
