Now this. is usability that solves a problem: when you login to the National Grid website (our electric utility company), you are immediately given a one-click option to pay your bill with your stored bank account information.
Since this is literally the only reason I ever go to the National Grid website, it’s a great time-saver for me.
(Now I just wish that restaurants website designers would understand that all anyone wants from a restaurant website is the menu, hours and a way to make a reservation.)
A Domino’s employee throws pizza dough in the air at a newly designed Domino’s restaurant in Ann Arbor, MI. Alternate caption: A Domino’s employee fends off attack from rogue pizza dough. (AnnArbor.com)
Growing up in Oklahoma, Pizza Hut was our pizza chain of choice, I spent the obligatory high school years working at a pizza shop called Simple Simon’s. After I went to college, we turned to Little Caesar’s $5 pizzas to cure us of our Friday night “sickness”. And now, in Boston, if we’re not visiting one of the local pizza/sandwich/deli/froyo/salad shops around here (which are great), we’re going to Naked Pizza.
Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s and Naked Pizza all have the same decor: they’re small, cramped, had maybe a single table and a couple of chairs. It was oddly lit (and I’m pretty sure everyone in there was high and under 20 years old).
The truth is, more than 60% of pizza customers order for delivery. But that still leaves 40% (give or take, obviously) that walk into the store to pick up their pizza.
“The fact is, better than one in three of our customers come into our stores for carryout,” Doyle explained. “We just haven’t been very welcoming to those folks in the past.”
“What our customers told us they want is to be able to see us make the pizza,” he continued.
The newly designed stores feature open kitchens so customers can see employees spinning dough in the air and prepping pizzas. It includes interactive features such as a chalkboard for customers to write comments.
Customer experience matters, and Domino’s is using customer feedback to help make a seemingly mundane customer experience better.
Filed under “Never trust a skinny chef”, the former CEO of a failing airline gives us insight into where the retail experience is headed:
Merchants need to quickly learn the lessons that airlines have over the last 30 years: Deal with a shopper’s lust for price-parity, and compete on a new level based on providing the features that customers value and are unique to brick-and-mortar retailers.
He then goes on to suggest best prices in-store and offering special bottled water in the dressing room. All for a fee, of course.
The nickel-and-diming is begrudgingly accepted in the airline industry because there are only a handful of ways you can fly from point-A to point-B. But as the Southwest and JetBlue airline model proves, you don’t achieve profitable growth by up-charging for everything – you do it by treating your customers like humans. And (normal) humans don’t like getting screwed at every turn.
