This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine, Jan/Feb 2006.
Consumers now prefer DIY to ‘customer
service.’ Why? Although the number is dwindling, there are those who
recall the days of milkmen, gas station attendants and bank tellers.
Now, we take care of most of those jobs ourselves, and seem happy to do
it. There are few areas of our economy that haven’t been touched by the
growing self-service industry. And, it’s not something that’s being
forced on the customer by budget cuts and lower overhead. More and more
people just prefer to do it themselves.
What has transformed the shopper’s mindset from a desire to be waited on to a desire to serve himself?
Peter Honebein has made it his
business to find out. As a learning psychologist and instructional
designer, he has 10 years experience designing soft ware products and
training programs for customers and employees. Along with Roy
Cammarano, he has written “Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers: How Great
Customer Experiences Build Great Companies.”
Honebein sees the self-service
industry drawing on five types of do-it-yourself customers. The first
is the transactional customer who is willing to carry out the
transaction role of doing business. The next is the traditional
customer; this is the classic DIY kind of guy: he fixes it, builds it
and renovates it himself. Third is the conventional customer. This
customer is the co-creator of product value, where all products are
viewed as services and — through use of the product — the customer
becomes a co-creator of its applications. Fourth is the intentional
customer who wants to be in on the design phase. This customer shops
Build-A-Bear stores, designs his own basketball shoes at NikeID.com or
builds her own Barbie online. Lastly, there’s the radical customer.
This type discovers new ways to use a product; ways that weren’t even
intended when it was designed. iPOD is one example; it was intended for
music, but those radical customers wanted more so now we have pod
casting.
According to Honebein, the trick for
businesses is determining what type — or combination of types its
customers are and to design a system that satisfies them. Look at your
business through the eyes of your customer type and address operations
to that type.
Betting on self-service
Looking at business through the
customer’s eyes was the challenge facing Tim Yeltin, director of new
development for Charlson Broadcast Technologies (CBT), a Northern
Kentucky company that has been bringing IT innovations to the
horseracing industry since 1985.
To help provide a better information
delivery system, CBT developed the Replay Kiosk. Instead of a series of
numbers and a short comment to display a past race — as one would find
in the racing form — the kiosk offered players a chance to actually
view past performances. CBT later took the kiosk a step further with
its Super Carrel. Here, it combined the capabilities of its Replay
Kiosk with live television signals, archived replay videos, racing
forms and the ability to place wagers and order refreshments.
Yeltin believes CBT’s products are
successful because users — not operators — design them. CBT knows its
customers because its employees are racetrack players themselves.
That’s why when it first introduced Super Carrel at Kentucky’s Turfway
Park to its top 100 Fast Track members, betting increased 52 percent
with that group the first year.
Yeltin said he doesn’t see personality
type as a critical element of the self-service business because
technology in general makes us all self-service users. It has created a
nation of people who are used to having everything at their fingertips.
With an information-intensive pastime
like thoroughbred racing, kiosks and self- service are just a part of
good customer service.
Horse of a different color
Some see a darker side to customers’
willingness to serve themselves. Jim Mahanes is a former University of
Kentucky behavioral sciences professor who is currently with The
Psychological Testing Centre in Indiana. Mahanes has been working with
IT people and sees a trend with them that he thinks is reflective of
more people in general. In IT, IQ is taking precedence over EQ, or
emotional intelligence.
According to Mahanes, people are less
able to deal with their emotions and, as a result, are going into
emotional shutdown and disengaging from those emotions. People are
sealing themselves off not only from their emotions, but also from
others in general. Because of this emotional disconnect, more people
prefer the isolation of self-service to the interaction of customer
service. He likens the situation to the switchboard operator who has
too many in-coming calls and so pulls out all of the lines rather than
try to answer them. The cure, Mahanes said, is to engage people and
their emotions.
Dr. Kathleen Kirby, a licensed
psychologist and part-time professor at the University of Louisville,
sees self-service motivations a little less ominously. Kirby said they
are an example of individuals who want more control over the shopping
experience. DIY fulfills that need. She also sees a search for more
value being a factor for many. Comparison shopping is easier online or
at a kiosk where information is usually more plentiful. And, too,
there’s the Lake Wobegon factor: Some people are just shy. They are the
loners and geeks who would rather not deal with a person when it’s so
easily avoided. And, as all our lives become more hectic, time
management becomes another reason to do it yourself.
Peter Honebein concurs. According to
his book, increasingly customers are seeing no value in being served.
The interaction takes time they would rather spend on other activities.
Time has become a precious resource. They want to get in, get out and
get on with their lives.
Honebein also thinks many of the
motivating factors for self-service customers can be traced back to
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This theory, developed by Abraham Maslow
in 1943, contends that as humans meet basic needs, they seek to satisfy
successively higher needs.
At the base of the hierarchy are
physiological needs, followed by safety needs, then love/belonging
needs, esteem needs and, finally, self-actualization. A person’s needs
formulate his goals, and thus his activities. For instance, a person
struggling with physiological or safety needs will have little interest
in a kiosk, and someone addressing the need for esteem will have
greater things to contend with than shopping and so would prefer the
convenience of self-service.
In the end, Honebein said businesses
should let customers decide whether they want self-service or not by
offering both. As a business, you don’t really know whether the
customer may prefer customer service or self-service, so having both is
important. Incentives can steer people in the direction you would
prefer they go, but, ultimately, it boils down to discerning and
fulfilling needs.
