As customers' purchasing habits change, so do their experiences and so also do their expectations.
I recently booked my annual eye test at Specsavers, and because my usual store had no available weekend appointments left I made one at a different store.
Everything went as expected with the actual eye test, but on being transferred to the optical assistant it all went downhill rapidly. To cut a long story short, having been through this process numerous times before, my expectation was that they would help me choose my frames and then test the new prescription with me to check it was suitable.
What I got, however, was a dirty-looking, couldn't be bothered to ring-round to check if another store had the frames I wanted, couldn't be bothered to go upstairs to get a set of lenses to check the prescription strength suited me, and expected me to happily pay in excess of £100 for glasses without trying them.
After going a few times round the houses, he explained away his extremely poor customer service by declaring that because it was a franchise all the shops do things differently. I was fairly sure that was the opposite of what the premise of a franchise is based on, but by this point had lost my patience and left.
I promptly went straight over to my regular shop where they offered me the usual level of customer service that I had come to expect from them.
So, what does this tell us about franchises?
Franchising is an arrangement where one party (the franchiser) grants another party (the franchisee) the right to use not just its trade mark, name, products and services, but an entire system for operating the business according to certain specifications; development support, operating manuals, employee training, brand standards, quality control, a marketing strategy.
In the case of the MacDonald's, Wetherspoon's or Specsavers of this world, what that means for the average customer is an expectation that the environment, quality and range of products and services at any of the franchises would be comparable.
Specsavers today is the world's largest privately owned optical group, with more than 1,800 stores operating in 10 countries. So, they must be doing something right, right?
So, where did it go wrong for the Specsavers I visited? Was the training the assistant received below standard? Did the manager set low standards for quality? Was he just having a bad day?
Whatever it was – it shouldn't matter to the customer. Because customer experience is all about expectation. You can only rate your experience by what you had expected and whether it had met those expectations.
What does this tell us about customer experience?
We can see from the Specsavers experience that it isn't enough to get it right in some places and not others. Because if I had been a first-time shopper they wouldn't have seen me again, and I would probably have shared my experience so others could avoid a similarly disappointing one.
Also, the ease and speed of the online shopping experience has led customers to expect more from their retail experiences. They expect store assistants to be knowledgeable about their products and attentive to their needs. Research suggests that the top three reasons why consumers shop in-store at all anymore are all around experiencing the product before purchasing:
To look at the actual product
To check the quality
To feel/use the actual product
For all brands and organisations, even if you don't have a tangible product for customers to touch and feel, you will have levels of service quality for all your interactions with them. As businesses increasingly move more services online for customers they need to take care that they regularly listen to customers to ensure they're still giving them what they want at all touchpoints and channels. Because their expectations will change and you need to make sure you continue to meet them, giving them the levels of quality they have come to expect.
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