What is the one thing that booksellers would most like to know about our customers? It’s why they leave without buying things, either specific things or anything at all.
(OK, we would also like to know the phone numbers for some of them, or where the frak they got their attitudes, or occasionally more fanciful and inappropriate data. But I digress.)
You see, it’s much easier to find out why people do buy things — or at least the reasons that they think that they have for buying things, the underlying psychology of shopping often being quite different from what shoppers believe. Still, we can see what people are getting, and engage them in conversation about it. Often, these lead us to clues as to what we should be featuring, especially since they seem to be faster than we can be at catching instantaneous media memes. (For example, by the time that we found out about the Newbery and Caldecott winners this year, they had already long since been announced on NPR, and customers had cleared us out of all the copies in stock.)
But what we can’t really do is stand at the exits, buttonhole people, and ask them “What did you consider buying today, but end up not getting? And why didn’t you get it?”
We do know the answers to some of these things, but only when we’ve been part of the experience of a failure (we couldn’t find an item, the computer system locked up during an order, they tell us that they’ve seen it cheaper elsewhere), or they’ve come to us to complain.
But most customers who don’t get things don’t interact with us. They come in, look around, and leave. Or perhaps they get something else and leave. (At least in that case, we get to ask them at the checkout if they found everything that they had been looking for.)
Things that people don’t buy seem to break down into four simple categories:
- Things that they come in wanting to get but don’t find
- Things that they come in wanting to get, find, and decide not to buy
- Things that they run across in the store but don’t get
- Things that they might have wanted had they known that we had them
These probably can and should be broken down further. (As it is, the first draft of this list combined the initial two items.)
We do run customer surveys, asking randomly selected customers at the checkout to call and answer some questions. But that only reaches the customers who get as far as making a purchase. Those who bail out earlier are invisible to the surveys.
One thing that helps, of course, is engaging as many customers as we can on the sales floor. Any of us are pretty close to compulsive about doing so. But, inevitably, we’re outnumbered much of the time (though, perhaps, not as often as we’d like nowadays). And some customers would rather be left alone.
I trust that our corporate overlords have ways of capturing at least some of this information, invisible as they may be to those of us in the trenches. I know that companies such as Paco Underhill’s Envirosell specialize in this work. And no doubt there are lots of MBA’s in Marketing thinking about this.
But it’s still frustrating at the individual bookseller’s level. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we might work to find this information out more effectively?
(A link to what triggered this line of thinking: the post “Five tips for better online surveys” on Seth Godin’s blog.)
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Enjoyed this post and read more of your blog. Just wanted to say thanks for letting me browse in your space for a few moments this morning.
Increasingly, I find customers come in looking for a book, they ask for help finding it, I find it for them, they flip through it, decide they want it and then say “Thanks, but I am going to buy it online because I know I can get it cheaper. I just wanted to see if it was any good”. Takes the wind right out of this bookseller’s sails.
I think the interesting cases are #1 and #3:
1) I come into the store knowing what I want; I either know where it is, or I ask someone where it is. It isn’t there, so I walk out. (Maybe I order it, but more likely these days I go to an on-line retailer).
3) I go into the store *not* knowing what I want. I look through the books in one or more of the areas that interest me, don’t find anything compelling, and walk out. On-line stores can’t service this demand well, because it would take me hours to look through the hundreds of books that I can take in (at least their spines) in a few minutes.
I like your question; it’s the kind of thing I ask myself all the time. I don’t think I have any answers, but I will ask two questions of my own:
1) Of the categories you posit (and any other significant ones), what proportion of our customer base do they represent? [It would be pretty easy to address the needs of any of these hypothetical customers, but would it be worthwhile in terms of the inconvenience posed to other kinds of customers, the booksellers, etc.?]
2) I’m fascinated by a hypothetical customer type: the ones with whom we never (or barely) interact. They don’t ask for help (and politely refuse it when it’s offered), are fully capable of figuring out where the books are that they are looking for, and, if they don’t find them, just leave to pursue some unknown alternative option. [As a corollary: They never complain.] How many of these people do we see? What would they want done differently? Are their enough of them, and are their levels of “maintenance” so low, that catering to them would be the best business model of all?
(The second question, in its probably-naive yearning after an unknown-but-hoped-for ideal, calls to mind the Black Box elevator in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist.)
@Donna: Yup, that is dismaying. The best that I can do in that case is direct the customer to our spiffy new e-commerce site, since swatting someone with the book in question is rarely an option.
@snoe: I’m also curious as to the proportions of our customers in the categories. It’s really hard to tell, precisely because they are numbers that we’re not counting. And balancing the desires and inconveniences to the various types of customer is difficult.
I understand that, in the days before I joined my company, they had a policy of stand-offishness. Workers were not to engage customers unless customers obviously wanted them to do so.
I can see the point in this. One challenge is, in spotting these customers, not breaking their shopping trance. All too frequently, after I’ve helped a customer, the person immediately checks out (or not) and leaves the store. Have we lost sales because they didn’t stay longer? Does this balance what we did find for them? It would take better tools and telepathy than we have to really know.
@John: One problem that I encounter in your case #1 is that we are always moving things around. People come in believing that they know where things are, but they actually only know where things were. The item isn’t there any more ,and they leave. This is especially a problem when someone comes in for something that had been on a display, but has since moved to another display (which happens a lot) or back into the item’s section. Customers think that we don’t have the item, but we actually do.
In case #3, the spine scan is a useful tool that is very difficult to match without the physical presence of the books. Assuming that the customer knows the appropriate category (which gets into all sorts of taxonomy issues), actually looking at the shelves is usually more effective and consistently more satisfying than doing so with current online technologies.
I can imagine a life-size display on which customers could slide around and zoom in on what they want using a touch-sensitive wall panel, then get it to open and flip through a book, then dump the items out via a print on demand box. (Sounds like something from the Foundation Trilogy.) But even given Moore’s Law, I think we’re at least a decade away from that. And there might be an epidemic of gorilla arm as a result.
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