In marketing, it's easy to screw up the deal--and the relationship!

[Previously posted on Google's BlogSpot by Keith Murray, August 20, 2009]

In the business of marketing, it's sometimes the little, tangential things that screw up the terms of the relationship. In other words, the central focus of the business is just fine--right product, right location, right features, right price--right everything...but the act of paying for it! And it's these kind of ancillary issues that can tip customers to the competitor.

On of those perennial problems that plague retailers is the checkout line--and the wait, frustration, and general unhappiness that comes from a delay in getting the customer and their stuff out of the establishment and on their way.

For the most part, handling this is trying to play the expectations games as best the firm can. No one likes to wait, so the effort is to minimize the delay that being in a queue causes customers; this is accomplished by having rush-hour reinforcements of cashiers, but frequently that is insufficient. Entertaining customers while in line is a more modern solution--what with opportunity to install flat-panel screens at the point of sale--however that all too frequently is to sell [i.e., advertising, promote, infomercialize], not entertain. An increasing number of outlets are installing self-serve check-outs, but in the short run--especially if you have any significant quantity of goods to buy--most customers prefer to be served, rather than become temporary "workers" for the store!

Compounding the frustration problem is the internal "math" that customers can do in their heads: they see all the check-out isles that were installed in the front of the store--there's frequently a lot of them--as they compute the all-too-frequently small proportion of them being manned at any point in time! The annoying logic goes like this: "Why did the people who run this place think it a good idea to have all these check-out isles installed when theybuilt the store, but now--especially now that I'm in the store--find it not such a good idea to actually use all of the check-out units to help get me out of here?????!!!"

One of the cheap and easy ways for retailers with queues to gain a little ground in this battle is to use the kind of queue strategies that banks and airlines have been using for a while. Carl Bialik in his August 18 Wall Street Journal article "Justice--Wait for It--on the Checkout Line," explains how this works. If you're either a customer or vendor, it's worth checking out!

In the end, not much has changed in terms of reducing customer wait-time; instead, what's changed is that now, at least, customers have the perceived satisfaction that they weren't screwed by getting in the slowest line, or that somebody else who came to the queue after them will get served first! It ain't much, but it's better than it used to be!