This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine's special section, FOCUS: Digital Signage & Touchscreens, April 2007.
At lunch today, I went to the nearby post office to mail a few bills. While waiting in line I was struck by a sign I saw on the wall, just down and to the right from the cashier.
"All credit cards must be signed to be accepted."
Fine. That's a great security measure that I can get behind. What I cannot get behind was the method used to tell me this simple message: a hastily assembled Word document, two different fonts, all caps, with a couple of bullets thrown in for no good reason. After it was printed, somebody had taken a red marker and underlined the first three words, and inexplicably put quotation marks around the word "all."
Oh, and this crucial message was affixed to the wall with packing tape.
The United States Postal Service is a 230-year-old organization that employs almost three-quarters of a million people. It did nearly $70 billion in sales in 2005. And it is communicating with its customers in a manner worthy of a third-grade classroom.Perhaps I'm just steeped in digital signage on a day-to-day basis, more so than most people, and that's why this bugs me so much. But I don't think so. I think it's a glaring example of an organization that is not paying attention to one of its mission-critical details: the point at which business and customer connect.
Retailers have struggled with this for as long as people have been buying things (which is a very long time). It's all well and good when Joe Entrepreneur has a single location — he can do a respectable job of managing his marketing and promotional materials. He can ensure consistent messaging across the entire enterprise, because his entire enterprise is small enough for him to patrol personally each day.
The minute a second store is opened, the challenges begin, because now you have to get other people involved. Additional locations mean additional managers, tasked with keeping communications in order and up-to-date. Even great employees with the best of intentions will make mistakes and place the wrong signs on the wrong end-caps at the wrong time; the problem grows exponentially when those employees don't really have their heart in their work. And the rate of failure for effective messaging grows in direct proportion with the number of boxes of posters and fliers and placards piled up in the back office.
As an enterprise grows, the challenges take off like those curves you tried to make sense of in college calculus. They're still every bit as inscrutable, but now there is much more at stake because all those new locations (or offices or restaurants or whatever) are serving more and more customers, each of whom might, at any given moment, abandon whatever brand loyalty they have if you do something that bothers them. Like, for instance, communicating your level of care about the safety of their financial records with a homemade sign and some packing tape.
Digital signage solves these problems. It allows the lone entrepreneur to manage all of his messages across every screen in every location; he can do this from his desk, or from a laptop on the road. It eliminates the ridiculous and dangerous practice of forcing branch locations to create their own signage and messaging. It brings a new level of intelligence to the whole procedure through scheduling tools and playlists and loops and day-parting.
And, most importantly, it does all of that in a way that makes the customer feel important. The emotional resonance that occurs when a customer sees a clean, aesthetically pleasing digital message is worlds apart from what he feels when he sees communication thrown together in a way that implies that you just don't care what he thinks.
But you do care what your customers think. Don't you?
