Last Night the AA put my Daughter in Danger

And what her reaction says for retailers

Around 7:45PM yesterday, my daughter’s car drifted to an ignominious halt. She gave her now customary five minute rant at Italian mainstream automotive shortcomings, bless her, she doesn’t remember the Fiat X1/9 and Alfa Romeo Spider we all lusted over when we were her age.

Now, bear with me, this story has a massive relevance to what we are attempting to pull off as modern retailers but first I need to finish this tale of woe…

Rosy drifted to a halt yelled at Fiat for a bit and then called the AA. Rosy has paid Automobile Association subs since getting this Punto, her first car, she’s a brand girl; prefers to go with trusted and reliable names when important things such as being rescued from the side of dodgy roads in the night are concerned.

In this case, those dodgy roads were within the Oxford City ring road, presumably easily reachable by an AA patrol. But the car was in an awkward spot and the area not the best.

I promise this is relevant to the new customer-retailer dynamic.

Given an estimate that she would be reached within an hour, she then rang her boyfriend and afterwards phoned me. Mike went to wait with her, which was proper gentlemanly of him and I sat at home visualising all the worst things in the world that you want to protect your kids from.

Around an hour after the first call, a non-AA-branded patrol arrived. On time, excellent. The chap had a look, diagnosed the problem as a snapped gear-change cable and said he would call for a recovery truck.

And then left.

That truck was promised for an hour or so. 9:40 came and went.

Rosy phoned the AA again, who at this point were still unaware that anyone other than a lone female had phoned them for help. They promised another hour. Dark and cold, and with the car immovable in a dangerous spot, Rosy retreated again to the warmth of Mike’s car. But the AA didn’t know that, they still had notes that a girl on her own was waiting in a dodgy spot in the freezing cold and dark.

A text arrived promising 10:50, fully three hours now from the breakdown but at least it was an even firmer promise than the last failed promise. Perhaps this one would be real?

At this point, Rosy noticed a group of young lads approach her stricken car. At first they warily circled it, then began to try the doors. Mike got out of his car and approached them and they scattered empty handed. Had Rosy been on her own nearby with her phone and purse, would she still have those now?

No truck at 11PM.

No truck at midnight, four and a half hours on from the first call.

And then, at 12:10AM, finally a flatbed and a reassuring driver.

Rosy had been in the cold, the dark, had been messed around by the AA system; text messages promising times turning out to be nonsense, she’d been effectively lied to by the call centre each time she’d phoned back to check. She was hungry, tired and rightly pissed off. She had been put in danger in a completely unacceptable manner. This was bad.

I spoke to her this morning and she asked whether to post her complaint to the AA or email it: I suggested both.

Then I said that no matter what the recompense, this was such an awful failure of the idea of roadside recovery, that perhaps we should swap her onto the RAC or Green Flag come renewal time. Rosy’s response? The bit that speaks gigantic volume to our challenges and opportunities as post-retailer-era retailers? Rosy’s response was a reluctant shrug and a ‘hmm, maybe, I don’t know. Probably not.’

All logic says most people would burn their AA card there and then, doesn’t it?

No, actually; most people, most customers, my lovely daughter included, and me too if I’m honest, suffer at the hands of status-quo bias. Status-quo bias is an emotional bias that creates a strong preference for things as they are, for the current state of affairs. It is strongly connected to cognitive non-rational loss aversion and in practice means no matter how badly our current brand/supplier/retailer messes up, we are reluctant to swap the known for the unknown.

Logically, Rosy should have already cancelled her AA Membership direct debit and started anew with the RAC but she has never been an RAC member, she has no concrete evidence that the RAC wouldn’t be as bad as the AA. The RAC have given her nothing she can use to justify breaking the status quo. Maybe the next time the AA will deliver on it’s brand promise? So goes the bias. The motivators that led Rosy to choose the AA in the first place remain intact, despite the awful experience, because she has no sight of a provably better alternative. At this point, the AA may have shown that it can fail but the RAC have not proven that they can succeed.

This is a collection of biases and effects; status-quo bias, loss-aversion and endowment effect (the things I own are more valuable/better because I own them) that we see in play in lots of customer-vendor relationships: how many of you reading this are still banking with the firm you opened your first account with as a teenager, despite multiple mess ups and demonstrably better deals elsewhere? Are you with your best value electricity supplier? Is your broadband the best possible combination of features, value and function? Honestly?

So lets assume the RAC are indeed capable of offering a better product than the AA? How do the RAC break these powerful biases and effects? By using the immediacy of our new connected world to their advantage; be wherever people are thinking about rescue and be showing you can deliver on the things that really matter to people in those circumstances. Make it crazy easy to tick whatever boxes that customer needs ticking.

What else? Personalise the message to Rosy — meet her specific worries about switching, make it easy to trial the service, make it insanely easy to switch, defeat loss aversion by offering generous refund policies (Majestic Wine will refund any customer the price of a bottle of wine if that wine didn’t live up to the promise — try it, they really will refund you with a smile and you really will feel weirdly compelled to buy from them again). Promote the brand using believable examples that mean something to the customer you are trying to tempt away. The AA’s current TV adverts showing an incredulous patrolman coming to the aid of a stranded naturist might be funny, they might even be memorable but they offer absolutely zero reassurance that the service will keep a member stranded in a rough part of Cowley in the cold, dark and pissing rain safe on a crappy Tuesday night.

Reduce purchase friction and increase shopping reward…

As retailers, I can’t offer a data point as proof but you can certainly see anecdotal evidence of status-quo bias in play; customers doggedly sticking with a supermarket that routinely disappoints, customers continuing to shop in ways that make less sense when it has become so easy for them to fulfil the same needs much more easily elsewhere or in a different form. But here’s where the insight becomes really worth listening to: I strongly suggest that status-quo bias is much weaker when customers are only habitually tied to a particular store or way of shopping, rather than tied by a regular direct debit. It is possible for customers to challenge their own status-quo bias much more easily and risk aversion is less powerful if the spend can be sampled without necessarily full commitment to a new method of shopping or a new retail supplier. You can use that, you can develop ways to give people a taster of your experience, to bring them in with minimum risk and then show them your great time.

Rosy’s story might appear extreme but I doubt it — it’s a true account of a depressingly routine failure of a brand to deliver on it’s promise. Her reaction and her reluctance to try an alternative vendor is telling and it is an important aspect of the drive to reduce purchase friction and increase shopping reward. If you want customers to come to your retail business, you not only have to be easy to shop and deliver lots of compelling advantages to shopping with you; you also have to get really good at breaking the status-quo bias by living your promise. If you say you offer the best possible advice and support then you must really do that. If you claim to be the cheapest or most convenient then you must demonstrably be so.

Now that customers have all the power and can go to whichever retailer, in whatever form, they please; you have to make it incredibly easy for them to see that you are the easiest, the best, the most rewarding option. Be low friction and high reward and get really good at proving you are those things.

Rosy might allow inertia to keep her with the AA at renewal time. But that won’t be because the AA has won her business, it will because the RAC have failed to reassure her that it would do look after her better.

Richard is Managing Director of retail consultancy Smart Circle Limited

For more on reducing purchase friction/increasing shopping reward, I’ve posted a lecture at www.frictionreward.com

The new edition of my book, Smart Retail, is available now, friction-free, fromamazon.

See more from me at www.Smart-Circle.com and @TheseRetailDays