Posted on Monday, 5th November 2007 by LMN
A big story in consumer electronics this season is the recent announcement that Comp USA will close all of its remaining 103 stores. The retailer was purchased by Special Equity, an affiliate of private equity firm Gordon Brothers Group that recently announced the closing.
This comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed CompUSA for some time and may come as no surprise to anyone who has shopped there frequently. You may be aware of this from personal experience of from reading blogs about CompUSA’s service. In either case, there is a valuable lesson to be learned here. As a matter of course, this retailer broke most of the rules of Customer Relevancy:
Rule 1 - deliver products and services that meet your customer’s expectations. When you buy a computer you expect to get some assistance setting it up and support when it fails.
Rule 2 - sell products and services that make sense to your customers and at a price that is fair. If it is impossible (or near impossible) to take advantage of rebate offers or if the company will sell you an extended warranty on a “throw away” product, then customers will lose trust in the company, and think of its pricing as unfair.
Rule 3 - script the experience when you deliver your products and services, and make doubly sure you surprise and delight your customers. An extremely short return period and a “difficult” return process will quickly erode customer satisfaction. CompUSA was rated among the ten worst retail sites for customer satisfaction in 2006 by the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index that annually surveys 1.6 million consumer households.
Rule 4 - deliver service that really helps your customers. A team of “service” people that know little to nothing about the products that are being sold is wasted overhead, and just plain irritating.
Rule 5 - make your products and services easy to obtain by providing adequate access to your locations - physical or web. Clearly, access is critical. If your customers can’t get there then they won’t buy. Walmart, Best Buy and Walgreens seem to have figured this out.
Rule 6 - motivate your customers to consistently buy from you. For a customer to feel consistently motivated to buy from you, your company must be connecting with your customers at an emotional level. PR, advertising and the experience help to create the emotion connection and reason for coming back. When customers aren’t motivated they quickly turn to competitors.
CompUSA is an example of what will happen if your company consistently breaks the Relevancy Rules and forgets the value customers. So, how do you make sure you don’t forget? Simply, ask your customers!
At least once per year (now is a great time) you should have a professional complete a statistically valid survey of your customers to determine how you are doing and what you can do to improve their experience.
If you are not asking your customers, then you can be sure you are slowly becoming irrelevant!
Growth is Good!
Leamon Crooms
The Guru of Growth®
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