Transparency: Loyalty :: Bacon: Mmmm
Hereâs a recap of a recent conversation with a store associate during checkout:
Store Associate:Â Would you like us to email you the receipt?
Perceived benefits in my head:Â Iâll save paper. I wonât throw the receipt away only to need it later. Less potential clutter.
Me:Â Sure. Sounds great.
I then provided my email address using the little key pad thingy.
What I found out later is the conversation should have gone like this:
Store Associate:Â Would you like to give us your email address thinking youâll receive a single email containing your receipt from todayâs transaction while also unknowingly subscribing to our email list to receive at least one email per day for the rest of your life from our brand and probably any affiliated brands about promotions that most likely arenât relevant to you?
Perceived benefits in my head:Â [crickets]
Me:Â Uhhhh, no thanks.
When I accepted the offer to have my receipt emailed to me, the perceived benefits were actualized. So thatâs great, right? I saved some paper â probably 2â x 27â based on typical receipt length these days. I avoided the clutter of having a paper receipt partly crumbled on my laundry room counter. And I ended up with an easy-to-find digital record of my transaction in case I needed it later. Not a bad customer experience â a pretty good one actually. I had a positive emotional experience with the brand.
Then, a week later, the onslaught started. The clutter I avoided on my laundry room counter started showing up in my email inbox. One, two, sometimes three emails per day started flooding in from this retailer and its affiliated brands. Of the dozen emails that first week, maybe two of them were relevant to me, and I still deleted them because I had no immediate need for those products.
The brief, warm and fuzzy feeling I had when I left the store two weeks earlier was replaced by a prolonged feeling of annoyance associated with the brand. They were forcing me to burn the extra 0.03 calories required to click or swipe the email into oblivion at least once per day. Finally, at witsâ end, Â I decided to burn the extra 0.75 calories required to unsubscribe from their email list.
So why am I sharing this? Consider it a friendly reminder.
Transparency in communication to your customers is the best long-term strategy for building trust and establishing loyalty. So everyone who participates in creating a piece of the customer experience pie for a company, no matter how small the piece, has a responsibility to stand up for the customer by being as transparent as possible. Bottom line: if you do whatâs best for your customer, itâs inevitably whatâs best for your company.Â
In the scenario outlined above, the company put themselves before the customer. They decided that building the size of their email subscriber list trumped the customer experience. They have reports with line graphs illustrating the fact that the more email subscribers they have, the more revenue they generate. So they sat in a room and came up with what they determined was the easiest way to acquire more subscriptions.
If any of us were in that room when the team came up with the idea, itâd be our duty to raise the concern and suggest an alternative approach. Such as the following script:
Store associate:Â Thanks for your purchase today. If youâd like to subscribe to our email list, I can email you todayâs receipt, and youâll get future receipts by email. Youâll also receive exclusive email offers, coupons and advanced notice of in-store events. Would you like to subscribe today?
Not quite as short and sweet as the real life scenario I recounted above, but transparent and enticing for the customer. And if I were to decide to subscribe under those circumstances, Iâd be much more likely to remain subscribed, even if all the emails werenât directly relevant or timely. And then in a few months, Iâd likely be pleasantly surprised by a relevant and timely email that I would then open, click on, and end up making a purchase.
Thatâs a win for me who has a good experience that I knowingly signed up for. And a win for the company who has built a lasting relationship with me and can throw my money onto their growing pile. Oh yeah, and bacon is delicious!
Also published on GIANT UX.













