Are we giving customers what they actually want, or what they say or think they want?
This was the question that sprang to mind when I took my 22-year-old Land Rover to an industrial estate to get its new chassis sprayed with a waxy anti-rust treatment. Handing over the keys, I spotted in the corner of the workshop an amazingly restored Series One Land Rover.
It was a real beauty in Atlantic Blue and canvas tilt. The proud owner gave me a guided tour: “It’s got a three litre Ford V6 fitted, disc brakes all round, the pedal box is from a Range Rover…it drives like a modern car even though it’s 56 years old.”
I made appreciative noises and left feeling deflated. He didn’t have a Series One . It was, to all intents and purposes, a Range Rover attached to a Series One Land Rover chassis and body. He didn’t get it at all.
A Series One Land Rover should be old - and slow. It should have an aged, clattery 1.6 litre Land Rover petrol engine and have a top speed of 45 mph. The pedals should come through the floor. It should be a challenging drive. Changing gear should be accompanied by lots of crunching of gears when you forget to double de-clutch.
Now, I’m no Land Rover purist that sends off all the original nuts and bolts to get sand-blasted and galvanised. I’m prepared to compromise, particularly in the interests of safety. In a 56 year old vehicle, safety belts and servo-assisted disc brakes make a lot of sense on today’s roads.
However, if I were setting up a company to supply Series One Land Rovers I’d save myself a lot of hassle by cutting down a Range Rover chassis and running gear to size and whacking on a replica Series One body. Around 90 per cent of customers would be happy.
But how many other examples are there of customers saying one thing when, in fact, they really mean something completely different?
The moral of this story for us as business owners must be this: don’t take customer requests at face value, find out more about what they really want.
It is plain in every day life that frequently the consumer and the vendor speak different languages. Or, to be more precise, use differing terminology and can have quite divergent ideas about what things mean. For example, a customer comes into your shop and asks for a ten-foot ladder. Do they want quite literally a ten-foot ladder, or do they want a six foot one, that extends to 12 feet, in order to more easily transport said ladder around on a car roof rack?
We can’t be sure unless we ask.
Thankfully, we can use technology to remove a lot of the guesswork and to fine-tune our ordering and stock levels. Retail technology, for instance, is becoming ever more sophisticated and able to extract all sorts of useful data quickly and easily.
In our ladder example, till and stock control software can integrate to produce a detailed picture of how many – if any - 10-foot ladders you sell in a given period compared to the volume of six foot extending ones. It can also identify which months you need to increase stock levels based on historic sales. For our ladders, sales will rise in the spring and peak in summer, tailing off as the bad weather of autumn and winter approaches when indoor folding ladders start to pick up again.
Predictable enough off the top of your head, but the retail technology available now can narrow these dates down to specific weeks and days of the year, allowing more accurate ordering and better stock and storage management. Link this data into client records and its possible near enough to offer targeted deals verging on personalisation.
A far cry from the highly illustrative retail hell envisaged in the famous “Two Ronnies” sketch, ‘The Hardware Shop’:
(Ronnie Barker enters the shop, wearing a scruffy tank-top and beanie, not looking the sharpest tool in the box. Ronnie Corbett is serving.)
RB: Four Candles!
RC: Four Candles?
RB: Four Candles.
(Ronnie Corbett makes for a box, and gets out four candles. He places them on the counter)
RB: No, four candles!
RC (confused): Well there you are, four candles!
RB: No, fork 'andles! 'Andles for forks!
