shopping

360 degree experience

Nike know a fair bit about branded experiences.  My new iPhone came with Nike + pre-installed.  Usually this would not be relavent to me, my default setting being couch-potato.  But for one reason or another I’m currently training, in less than a months time I’ll be punishing my body in water, bike and road, attempting to complete the London Triathlon.  So Nike+ got me curious.  To get it to work you need a sensor, so I took a trip down to the Nike Store in Covent Garden and bought myself a Nike+ sensor.  The sales assistant (after failing to cross sell me a pair of trainers for the sensor), showed me the bottom of my receipt.  “Look!” she said as she highlighted £250.  “You could win some cash by going to this website”, (circling the URL in the text).

Nike till receipt with URL

Sometime later and I entered the URL (rather long and cumbersome) and landed on a page asking me to enter the receipt number.  This presented me with a satisfaction survey on my store experience to complete.  The system was not intelligent enough to know what product I had bought, and there would be little for me to gain by being presented that information at this point.  At the end of the survey they invited me to enter my email address to enter a prize draw.  With this simple process they have linked an anonymous purchase of a known product with an email address.  An email address has value ; using a tools such as Flowtown from my social network activity they could start building a richer picture of me, including the extent to which I am connected and am an influencer.

Nike screen shot

The supermarkets have used till receipts for marketing (e.g. Tesco clubcard points) for a while.  But if you do not have an explicit point of sale loyalty scheme, this is an innovative way of connecting the offline purchase experience with an on-going on-line relationship.  Of course Nike go well beyond this.  From the iPhone app that was already installed, through to purchasing the Nike+ sensor, I now have a Nike account where I can track my running progress, uploading my training times after each run.  That really is a 360 degree experience.

The journey doesn’t end with the buy button

Take a look at this and tell me what information it conveys to you.  Look at the order status…

Dispatched.

So five days later when I ring up Laskys to find out what has happened to my product I’m told “we’re sorry, the product is out of stock.  Would you like another similar product?”  I’m not exactly a happy chappy to find this out five days after the order has been placed. I’ve been to ‘my account’ to track my order and it tells me that the order has (click on the help icon) “been processed and either has a delivery date or has been delivered”.  Well no actually, it is out of stock and your eCommerce system hasn’t accommodated that scenario in the customer experience.  Sorry Laskys, you lied to me.

“We did actually send you an email on the 8th of March to let you know this”.  So I went back through my mailbox and indeed they had sent me a mail.  I use gmail.  The mail was unread, but I get so many mails I don’t always open them, especially as gmail gives you the title and the first line of the mail.  The mail in question from Customer Service was titled “Your Order” and the following first line; “Thank you for placing an order with Laskys. TheSEBO X4 EXTRA  on order 025”.  nothing there to suggest that it was out of stock.  Just a generic subject and first line of copy.  They had taken my phone number as part of the process; no-one thought to ring me.  Overall a poor experience.  I won’t be buying from Laskys again and I suggest you don’t either.

There’s a lesson here.  It is easy to focus upon the shiny stuff, to get customers converting, clicking on that buy button.  But if the post-buy button experience is lacking; if you haven’t factored in operational excellence into your process, in the long run it is likely to cost you.