To demonstrate the role of customer profitability and customer relationship management in developing appropriate pricing and marketing campaigns in the financial services market. Feb 19, Revised: Mar 25, Brought to you by:. Narayanan, Lisa Brem The Royal Bank of Canada uses customer relationship management and customer profitability tools to gain a competitive advantage in Canada's increasingly crowded financial services market.
What's included: Educator Copy. Not teaching at a university? Register as a student Register as an individual. Overview Included Materials. Gottman, the executive director of the Relationship Research Institute. He has screened thousands of couples, interviewed them, and tracked their interactions over time. He and his colleagues use video cameras, heart monitors, and other biofeedback equipment to measure what goes on when couples experience moments of conflict and closeness.
By mathematically analyzing the data, Gottman has generated hard scientific evidence on what makes good relationships. HBR senior editor Diane Coutu went to the Seattle headquarters of the Relationship Research Institute to discuss that evidence with Gottman and to ask about the implications of his research for the work environment. As a scientist, he refuses to extrapolate beyond his research on couples to relationships in the workplace. The media have sensationalized his work, he says.
However, he was willing to talk freely about what makes for good relationships in our personal lives. Successful couples, he notes, look for ways to accentuate the positive.
On the contrary, individuals in thriving relationships embrace conflict over personality differences as a way to work them through. It takes time and work to make such moments part of the fabric of everyday life. How do you manage that? I know this question has come up in the media, which have tried to sex up my work.
But the reliability you see in my research has to do with studying relationships specifically. I rely on my research to be able to look at couples. And even with couples, I need to witness a sample interaction. The more emotional and the more realistic the situation is, the better I am at predicting with a high level of accuracy. We tell them to go build a paper tower that is freestanding, strong, and beautiful, and they have half an hour to do it.
Then we watch the way the couples work. One time we had three Australian couples do the task. Beforehand, we had the couples talk on tape about each other and about a major conflict in their relationship that they were trying to resolve. So we had some data about how relatively happy or unhappy they were. Your work depends heavily on your interviewing technique.
How did you develop it? My hero was Studs Terkel. Bill Moyers is good. Barbara Walters is very good, too, but Terkel is amazing. We studied his tapes and based our interview technique on his approach. It sounds simple, but in fact you could capture all of my research findings with the metaphor of a saltshaker. This is particularly important for men, whose ability to accept influence from women is really one of the most critical issues in a relationship.
Absolutely not. There are conflicts that you absolutely must have because to give in is to give up some of your personality. Let me explain by illustrating from personal experience. My wife is very bad at just sitting still and doing nothing. She never read it. She always has to be up and about doing things. I want to play music; I want to have a sense of leisure. We fight about this difference all the time.
She wants me to do stuff around the house, and I want her to take it easy. Another common issue in many relationships is punctuality. People have huge differences in their attitudes toward it and fight about it constantly. I actually analyzed about arguments last summer. With the help of the lab staff, I interviewed people about their fights—we saw them fighting in the lab and then outside the lab, and we talked about the issue.
What we learned from measuring all these interactions is that most people fight about nothing. But thanks to the Internet, customers and companies now have much the same information available to them, and there has been a consequent shift in power.
Armed with knowledge, customers are much more willing to negotiate terms and prices with companies. These are the services I want free in return for this commitment.
A customer at one telecom provider, a heavy user of long-distance services, even obtained preferential long-distance rates in exchange for a commitment to that provider. The popularity of businesses such as eBay and Priceline. Managers everywhere will have to get used to the idea that they are price takers as well as price makers. But as customers become more knowledgeable and recognize that they have choices and the power to negotiate, more businesses—from automakers to cosmetic-surgery clinics—will feel pressure to adopt an implicit if not an explicit auction process.
Preparing the Organization Readying the organization for customer competence in the new economy will require a major overhaul of the traditional governance systems and organizational struc- Co-opting Customer Competence 23 tures of the company.
For a start, accounting standards in the new economy need to factor in intellectual and human capital. The GAAP-based accounting systems that all companies use today were designed for stable business environments in which the most important Engaging in dialogue with assets were physical, such a diverse and evolving as inventory, land, and customer base in multiple buildings. Investment in channels will place a high premium on organizational these assets is treated as a capital investment, while flexibility.
But the competence of customers is an intangible asset, often a matter of knowledge and skill. It should be considered capital. Traditional market systems were designed to focus on allocating costs, which used to be the main determinant of price. But as auctions become a bigger factor in pricing, the importance of cost allocation declines. The systems are also ill equipped to cater to the constant reconfiguration of the supply chain that will result from the existence of multiple distribution channels.
Increasingly, companies will have to adopt a project-management approach to evaluating the performance of people and businesses rather than rely on quarterly and annual budget reviews.
In this way, managers will be able to judge the performance of individuals and teams over time while retaining the power to change the composition and tasks of the teams they lead.
The organizational consequences of competing in the market as a forum will, if anything, be even more drastic. Engaging in a dialogue with a diverse and evolving customer base in multiple channels will place a high 24 Prahalad and Ramaswamy premium on organizational flexibility.
In fact, no part of the company—a single salesperson or an entire business unit—will be able to assume that its role in the organization is stable. As business models are revised and new challenges and opportunities emerge, the organization will constantly have to reconfigure its resources—its people, machines, infrastructure, and capital. Managers have to create Velcro organizations, in which resources can be reconfigured seamlessly and with as little effort as possible—as in Velcro hooking and unhooking.
Managers must be prepared to deal with these traumas even as they identify the business challenges they face. The new marketplace will place a premium on managers who have collaboration and negotiation training. Learning, teaching, and transferring knowledge across boundaries will become essential skills. So, too, will the ability to attract—and retain—the right employees.
In an era when the pace of change keeps accelerating, the only way to stay ahead is to hire people who are self-motivated to change. It may sound paradoxical, but rapid change requires that companies have a stable center. Although products, services, channels, and business models can change with impunity, human beings—especially those who are healthy enough to change—still require some emotional anchors.
The real challenge for senior managers will be to provide that stability while embracing change. The Co-opting Customer Competence 25 only way to do that is to develop a strong set of organizational values.
It is easier to pay lip service to values than it is to live by them. Consider diversity in the workplace. It is a value professed by nearly all consulting firms—whose employees remain depressingly similar in age, class, and educational background. Providing stability in the new economy demands leadership that is intellectually vigorous and, at the same time, administratively savvy.
The ability to amplify weak signals, interpret their consequences, and reconfigure resources faster than competitors will be a source of advantage. The new frontier for managers is to create the future by harnessing competence in an enhanced network that includes customers. See Gary Hamel and C. But all too often those efforts are too narrow—they concentrate only on the points where the customer comes into contact with the company.
Few businesses have bothered to look at what the author calls the customer scenario—the broad context in which customers select, buy, and use products and services. In this article, the author shows how effective three very different companies have been at using customer scenarios as the centerpiece of their marketing plans. Each time they do so, it translates into millions of dollars in orders. And Buzzsaw. It has used the Web to create a better way for the dozens of participants in a constructions project to share their drawings and manage their projects.
Seybold lays out the steps managers can take to develop their own customer scenarios. Few companies have bothered to look carefully at the broad context in which customers select, buy, and use products and services.
As a result, companies have routinely missed chances to expand sales and deepen loyalty. Two shoppers go into Best Buy looking for new refrigerators. To the salesclerk who waits on them, the customers seem identical. The first shopper needs a new refrigerator to replace one that died the night before. Her goal is to keep her ice cream frozen, not to spend a lot of time browsing.
When the salesclerk treats these two customers the same, Best Buy loses out on some big opportunities. The time-pressed first shopper, for instance, values delivery speed above all else.
If the clerk could offer her expedited delivery—that afternoon, perhaps—she would likely buy a refrigerator immediately, Thinking in terms of even if the premium delivery customer scenarios has service involved a hefty suralways been useful, but charge. Best Buy might even want to offer him a free consulting service that would give him a comprehensive, customized plan for all the appliances he needs, a tailored delivery schedule, and a modest discount for his bulk order.
In delivering such benefits, the company becomes a vastly more important—and much more indispensable—supplier to its customers. Thinking in terms of customer scenarios has always been useful, but the arrival of the Internet makes the technique more powerful than ever. Because the Internet can deliver customized information and applications at a relatively low cost, companies can easily help customers carry out broad sets of activities.
In this article, I will show how three very different companies—the chip maker National Semiconductor, the grocery chain Tesco, and the on-line marketplace Buzzsaw. The company has worked hard to build deep relationships with two distinct Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 31 sets of customers: design engineers and corporate purchasing agents.
The design engineers are a particularly critical audience. In the late s, therefore, he launched an ambitious effort to develop a deep understanding of the scenarios in which design engineers work and to create on-line tools to support them. The project initially focused on the design of power supplies. Design engineers work under considerable time pressure, and, typically, the last part of a design they need to finish is the power supply module.
Gibson assembled a SWAT team to craft the powersupply design scenario. Made up of specialists in marketing, applications, and Web design, the team met with a variety of engineers and learned about the tasks required to design a power supply.
They boiled their findings down to a simple, four-step scenario: 1. Choose a part. Create a design. Analyze the design using powerful simulation tools. Build a prototype. The team then created a set of on-line applications, which they dubbed Webench, that would give engineers all the tools they needed to carry out this scenario. The system automatically generates possible designs, along with complete technical specifications, parts lists, prices, and cost-benefit analyses.
The engineer then refines the designs until one appears to satisfy the requirements. He or she can then run real-time simulations of the design, using a sophisticated software application National has licensed and offers on its site. The engineer can alter the design and simulate it as many times as necessary and then save all the iterations in a private portfolio—or even e-mail links to colleagues so they can run the saved simulations.
Once the engineer settles on a final design to be tested, the system can generate a bill of materials for creating a prototype. It even has links to distributors that carry those parts, listing their current prices. But Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 33 while engineers came to the Web site in droves, most backed out when they were asked for a credit card number.
So Gibson switched gears and made the simulation tool available for free. The strategy worked. Design engineers loved Webench, using it to design more than 20, power supplies in its first year of operation. Customers have found they can accomplish in a few hours what it previously took them months to do.
And they now have the time to explore alternatives—time they would never have taken before. One engineer went through more than design iterations for a single project; most go through five to ten. National has thought of everything I need— from a huge catalog of parts to fast simulations. They asked engineers about other activities they were having trouble completing efficiently.
In response, engineers said they wanted to subject complete product designs to thermal simulations; few of them had access to the sophisticated systems needed for such tests. Other engineers asked the company to help them design more of the circuitry, not just the power supplies, for mobile phones on-line. This request resulted in a new set of scenarios for engineers who design wireless devices.
Most were orders for a small number of sample parts for prototyping, but the company expects each early design win to translate into millions of dollars in sales. National benefits in another important way, as well. By carefully monitoring the number and type of designs customers complete, the company is better able to predict the number and type of parts it will need to manufacture.
Using Customer Scenarios to Guide Web Strategy Despite much initial hype, most Internet grocery stores have struggled to attract customers and make money. The traditional customer scenario for grocery shopping has six steps: Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 37 1.
Decide what my family needs this week. Make a shopping list. Go to the store. Select groceries and pay for them. Take them home. Put them away. Tesco thought that on-line sales could save customers considerable time and effort in steps 2 through 5. Customers could automate the creation of their grocery lists based on their prior purchases and avoid having to drive to and from stores, lugging heavy bags around.
But when the company talked to its customers and watched their behavior, it found that the vast majority of them enjoyed shopping in stores—they liked to examine and touch the fresh produce and see what new products had been stocked on the shelves.
They also trusted their local supermarkets, counting on them to provide quality goods at fair prices. Most customers did not see on-line shopping as a substitute for traditional shopping; they saw it as a complement, a way to save time when they were in a hurry. Gary Sargeant, a former store manager who now heads up Tesco Direct, quickly rejected one of the basic tenets underlying the strategies of most on-line grocers: consolidating inventory and fulfillment operations in a central warehouse to reduce costs.
He knew that customers would prefer to purchase on-line from the store in 38 Seybold which they normally shopped in person. That way, they would always be charged the same prices and have the same selection of products no matter how they decided to buy; there would be no discord between the two scenarios. That benefited both the customer and the company. It significantly raised the odds that all the products a customer ordered would be available.
Of course, the decentralized strategy raised operational challenges. To meet them, Sargeant handpicked a team of logisticians to help design the optimal in-store pick-and-pack system to fill the on-line orders. It works like this: order pickers in the stores use shopping carts specially equipped with six trays and an on-line display. And if an item has gone out of stock in the few hours that elapsed since the order was placed, the picking application proposes an alternate product from a list of items that the customer previously purchased.
Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 39 Once the shopping cart is filled, the trays are loaded directly into delivery vans that wait behind each store. Any items that have been substituted are carefully placed on top so they can be reviewed and accepted or rejected when the order is delivered.
It rigorously monitors on-time deliveries, order accuracy, and customer satisfaction. A simple alert goes off whenever such a drop occurs. By September , Tesco. And, as Tesco foresaw, the site has not displaced its traditional stores.
What about profits? Obviously, it costs more for Tesco to fill an on-line order than to let customers do the shopping themselves. The remaining costs are 40 Seybold covered by the on-line shoppers themselves, who tend to order more profitable items than in-store shoppers. When a customer checks off an item such as bread , other related items such as marmalade or butter pop up on the screen.
In many cases, a close examination of customer scenarios can spur innovative ideas for entirely new businesses. She got a surprising answer. There are too many places where things slip through the cracks. That story and others got Bonaparte to thinking: why not create a better way for the dozens of participants in a construction project to share their drawings electronically and manage their projects from end to end? Thanks to computerized design tools and the Internet, engineers, architects, contractors, and building owners were doing most of their collaborating electronically, but there was no efficient and dependable way for them to manage all the complex interactions or to exchange widely divergent types of computer files.
Bonaparte came to believe that a well-designed Internet work space could find great success in the market. From that idea, Buzzsaw. The team that launched Buzzsaw. From the research, the team laid out a high-level customer scenario for construction projects: 1. Set project scope, schedule, and budget. Gain financial backing.
Recruit the team. Develop the design. Produce the plans and specifications. Manage the bidding and negotiations. Manage the construction process. Manage the facility The team recognized, however, that this scenario was just a broad framework; there were many variations.
A renovation project, for instance, often skipped the first two steps. Moreover, all the participants, from architects to bankers to plumbers, had their own scenarios, which played out within the larger one.
And they all tended to work in idiosyncratic ways, following different processes, using different software, and even defining projects very differently. The team saw that the secret to success lay not in imposing rigid scenarios on customers but in providing on-line tools that would allow customers to design their own scenarios.
In conceiving its on-line work space, Buzzsaw. The site allows participants to store and access building plans, schedules, contracts, and procurement documents in all the common file formats. Team discussions, management decisions, and document revisions are automatically tracked. And team members collaborate to revise drawings in real time using on-line meeting tools. Most important, Buzzsaw. Thus, the site can accommodate an infinite variety of customer scenarios. From that starting point, Buzzsaw.
Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 43 Upstream, for example, the site includes a directory of local contractors and specialists to aid in recruiting a team, and it offers loan-processing and project-tracking tools for banks and other financial backers to use. Downstream, Buzzsaw. It helps manage the bidding process by automatically distributing the bid packages and subsequent modifications to contractors and subcontractors.
The site also lets subcontractors automatically solicit bids for materials from their own suppliers, thus streamlining the procurement process, which is essential to effective project management.
Very little buying or selling takes place. Instead of making its money by exacting tiny commissions on transactions, Buzzsaw. It also earns supplementary revenues from licensing its Project Point software to reprographers and from fees for procurement and printing services.
After piloting the site with a core group of customers in late , Buzzsaw. By then, it had already attracted about customers, many of whom were running multiple projects on the site. Its clients Buzzsaw. This chart shows the key steps in Buzzsaw. By November , a struggle to streamline their year after Buzzsaw. At an average of 7.
Fifteen percent of the customers were located outside the United States, and several U. The most important factor driving Buzzsaw. Typically, a new client, such as an architectural firm, will try out Buzzsaw. For its next project, it will use Buzzsaw. Those team members, in turn, will begin using Buzzsaw. This is a true example of viral marketing, and it happens because Buzzsaw.
The best way to get started is to sit down and try to map out some simple scenarios. Be as explicit as possible business travelers who use corporate travel agents, for example, or builders of housing developments.
The end point is what the customer considers to be the successful achievement of his or her goals. Mentally walk through each step as if you were the customer. What Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers 47 can your company do to support those activities and supply that information? Where can you save the customer time and trouble? How might your involvement influence the buying choices the customer makes?
What new resources would you need? What process changes would you have to make? What technologies would you need to install?
You should go through this exercise for a number of different target customers, customer goals, and customer situations. You must test your assumptions with the real people who use your products and services, working with them to refine scenarios and produce new ones. Ultimately, the goal should be to empower your customers to define their scenarios for you. Sometimes, this can be accomplished with technology, by providing online tools for customizing work flows and activities, as Buzzsaw.
Other times, it means keeping the lines of communication wide open, as National Semiconductor strives to do. Tracking the way customers perform the steps that matter most to them can reveal further opportunities to enhance their overall experience. We live in a time when customers are under unceasing pressure to do things more quickly, to cram more 48 Seybold into each day. By thinking broadly about the challenges your customers face, rather than narrowly about what you can sell them, you can almost always find ways to make their lives easier.
That, more than anything else, will earn you their loyalty. Such wishful thinking holds that retailers will thrive if only they communicate better with customers through e-mail, employ hidden cameras to learn how customers make purchase decisions, and analyze scanner data to tailor special offers and manage inventory. The author illustrates how some retailers have built successful operations by attending to these commonsense ways of dealing with their customers and how others have failed to do so.
The demise of Montgomery Ward in the realm of bricks and mortar as well as the struggles of eToys on-line—to choose only two recent examples—make it clear that no retailer can afford to be complacent because of previous successes or rosy predictions about the future of commerce. The wishful thinking holds that retailers will thrive if only they communicate better with customers through e-mail, employ hidden cameras to learn how customers make purchase decisions, and analyze scanner data to tailor special offers and manage inventory.
But the truth of the matter is, there are no quick fixes. My superior solutions to their research includes interneeds, respect, an emotional views with senior and connection, fair prices, middle managers and frontline employees, and convenience. If one of the pillars of a successful retailing operation is missing, the whole edifice is weakened.
You also have to set prices fairly and make it easy for people to find what they need, pay for it, and move on. These pillars sound simple on paper, but they are difficult to implement in the real world. But what does this really mean for retailers?
Inferior Retailers. Superior Retailers. Solutions gather products, stack them on shelves, put price tags on them, and wonder where their customers are. Emotions act as if their customers are Spock-like Vulcans who make purchases solely according to cold logic.
Pricing focus exclusively on their supposed low prices, often because they have nothing else of value to offer customers. The Old Pillars of New Retailing 53 have a problem—a need—and the retailer hopes to provide the solution. Focusing on solutions means employing salespeople who know how to help customers find clothing that fits and flatters, having tailors on staff and at the ready, offering home delivery, and happily placing special orders.
The Container Store provides its customers with superior solutions. The store chain, based in Dallas, averages double-digit annual sales growth by selling something that absolutely everyone needs: storage and organization products. From boxes and trunks to hangers, trays, and shelving systems, each store carries up to 12, different products.
The company accomplishes this mission well. It starts with the selection of merchandise, which must meet criteria for visibility, accessibility, and versatility. Store organization is another key ingredient of superior solutions at the Container Store. The merchandise is organized in sections such as kitchen, closet, laundry, office, and so on.
Many products are displayed in several sections because they can solve a variety of problems. A sweater box, for example, can also store office supplies. Plastic trash cans can also be used for dog food and recyclables.
The company is very careful about hiring; it patiently waits until it finds just the right person for a position. Container Store employees are well trained to demonstrate how products work and to propose solutions to complex home organizational problems.
They are also treated very well, both in terms of pay and in less tangible ways. In fact, the Container Store was ranked the best place to work in the country in and by Fortune magazine. The Container Store has many imitators, but none have matched it.
Many businesses have only the fuzziest concept of selling solutions. Department store chains, for example, have stumbled in recent years. They lost their one-stop shopping advantage by eliminating many merchandise categories outside of apparel and housewares. And even as they focused on apparel, they lost ground both to specialty retailers that have larger category selections and to discounters that have lower prices. Finally, they lost their customer service advantage by employing salespeople who often are little more than poorly trained order takers.
The Container Store has The Old Pillars of New Retailing 55 figured this out; many department stores and other struggling retailers must go back to the beginning and answer these basic questions.
Pillar 2: Treat Customers with R-e-s-p-e-c-t The best retailers show their customers what Aretha Franklin sang about: respect. Again, this is absolutely basic, and most retail executives would say that of course they treat customers with respect. Everyone has stories to tell about disrespectful retailing. They glance in your direction but continue to ignore you. After awhile, you walk out, never to return. He suggests that you try the garden center. Once again, you head for the exit. Stories about women trying to buy cars, as everyone knows, are enough to make your hair curl.
The fact is, disrespectful retailing is pervasive. Cluttered, poorly organized stores, lack of signage, and confusing prices all show lack of respect for customers. Likewise, their prices, returns policy, and advertising are transparent. Riggio listened to prospective customers who wanted bigger selections of books, more convenient locations, and less intimidating environments. He put superstores in all types of communities, from big cities like Atlanta and Chicago, to smaller cities like Midland, Texas, and Reno, Nevada.
His respect for the customer led him to create stores with spacious and comfortable interiors, easy chairs for relaxing with a book, and Starbucks coffee bars. To this day, he considers his best decision the installation of easy-to-find public restrooms in the stores. He views the store network and Barnesandnoble. Customers can ask salespeople at Internet service counters to search Barnesandnoble. Customers in a superstore can order the books they want on-line and have them shipped either to that store or to any other address.
If a return is necessary, customers can bring their on-line purchase back to the store. Instead, they neglect the opportunity to make emotional connections and put too much emphasis on prices. Many U. Making consumers wait up to two months to receive their furniture contributes to these poor results.
Poor marketing also hurts the industry. Most furniture stores focus strictly on price appeals, emphasizing cost savings rather than the emotional lift that can come from a new look in the home. The opportunity to establish such feelings is open to any retailer, regardless of the type of business or the merchandise being sold. Everyone is emotionally connected to some retailers—from local businesses such as the wine merchant who always remembers what you like; to national companies like Harley-Davidson, which connects people through its Harley Owners Group; to catalog retailer Coldwater Creek, which ships a substitute item to customers who need to make returns before the original item is sent back.
One retailer that has connected especially well with its target market in recent years is Journeys, a Nashville, Tennessee-based chain of shoe stores located primarily in shopping malls. The chain focuses on selling footwear to young men and women between the ages of 15 and The chain has achieved double-digit comparable-store sales increases in five of the six years since then and is now expanding by as many as new stores per year.
Journeys has penetrated the skepticism and fickleness that are characteristic of many teens. By keeping a finger on the pulse of its target market, the company consistently has the right brands available for this especially brand-conscious group of consumers.
Equally important, it creates the right store atmosphere—the stores pulsate with music, video, color, and brand merchandising.
A Journeys store is both welcoming and authentic to young people; it is simultaneously energetic and laidback. Customers frequently visit a store in groups just to hang out; salespeople exert no pressure to buy. The stickers, which usually feature one of the brands Journeys sells, often end up on backpacks, skateboards, school lockers, or bathroom mirrors.
Journeys also publishes a bimonthly magazine, Dig, that is available in the stores, and it runs a Web site that seeks to replicate the atmosphere of its stores.
Journeys works in large part because it has created an atmosphere that connects emotionally with the young people it serves. Other retailers should bear in mind that it takes more than a room full of products with price tags on them to draw people in. Consider some of the pricing tactics commonly used by certain home improvement retailers. Still another company promotes lower-grade merchandise implying that it is top quality.
We adjust our prices daily to the lumber commodity market. Excellent retailers seek to minimize or eliminate the psychological costs associated with manipulative pricing. Price is the only reason they give customers to care. Retailers can implement a fair-pricing strategy by clearing two hurdles. First, they must make the cultural and strategic transition from thinking value equals price to realizing that value is the total customer experience.
Second, they must understand the principles of fair pricing and muster the courage needed to put them into practice. Retailers who price fairly sell most goods at regular but competitive prices and hold legitimate sales promotions.
They make it easy to compare their prices with those of competitors, and they avoid hidden charges. The promise of lifetime service includes annual tune-ups, brake and gear adjustments, wheel straightening, and more. Vendors and former employees come to work at the huge event—some Constant sales, markdowns even fly in to participate. The the long term. Owner Chris Zane convinced area school administrators to distribute flyers to students under 12 announcing that policy. What do I need? Slow checkout is particularly annoying to busy people.
The shopper may follow through this time but find 64 Berry another store next time. To compete most effectively, retailers must offer convenience in four ways.
They must offer convenient retail locations and operating hours and be easily available by telephone and the Internet access convenience.
They must make it easy for consumers to identify and select desired products search convenience. They need to make it possible for people to get the products they want by maintaining a high rate of in-stock items and by delivering store, Internet, or catalog orders swiftly possession convenience. And they need to let consumers complete or amend transactions quickly and easily transaction convenience.
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