The single most important number that directly impact your profitability doesn’t even appear on your financial statements: Customer Satisfaction. Our Ask Ms. Jones™ process provides you with prompt, actionable information so you’ll know exactly what your customers are saying about you, which positions you as a problem solving expert armed with answers that can laser guide your store to the top of the heap.
Our furniture-exclusive process, based on the Net Promoter Score (or NPS®), is a straightforward metric that holds you accountable for how you treat customers. The concept was first popularized through the book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth. Employees at all levels of the organization understand it, opening the door to customer- centric change and improved performance.
How to Calculate Your Score
NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? — you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company’s performance through its customers’ eyes. Customers respond on a 0-to-10 point rating scale and are categorized as follows:
Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
To calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors.
This is not a traditional customer satisfaction program, and simply measuring your NPS will not lead to success. You’ll need to follow an associated discipline to actually drive improvements in customer loyalty and enable profitable growth. You must have leadership commitment, and the right business processes and systems in place to deliver real-time information to employees, so you can act on customer feedback and achieve results.
In this morning’s New York Times I was struck by recent purchase of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field by the Ricketts family from TD Ameritrade fame.
This reminded me of furniture store stories for several reasons. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series for 101 years, Wrigley Field is the second oldest ball park in MLB and the Ricketts family made all of their wealth changing the rules of the stock trading industry. This same juxtaposition is taking place right in front of us in our industry daily.
Opportunity abounds. Our 100 year plus casegoods and textile businesses are dying painfully. New ideas for design, distribution, pricing, etc. are presenting themselves daily. At the same time, the hanger-on-ers continue to hang-on. Old thinking is sucking the life from many.
The Cubs and Wrigley were both owned by the same company, The Tribune Co., which is operating under bankruptcy protection. So is the Los Angeles Times and several other recognizable newspapers. Furniture stores continue to typically spend over one-third of their marketing budgets using this failing delivery vehicle.
Paid content news providers are growing by more than 25% annually. Aggregation websites such as Fark, Boing-Boing, ebaumsworld, CollegeHumor and Digg, and the sheer filtering efficiency of social networks do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Online search is now part of nearly every furniture purchase cycle, reportedly reaching 95% during the last twelve months.
So, who will be the Ricketts family who changes the furniture landscape in the coming years? It will be the folks who laugh out loud when they read quotes like this one by Elbert Hubbard, “Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them.”
Bob Garfield, Robert Picard, and Greg Stielstra are all making the case that we have entered the post-advertising age. How are you allowing your customer to engage with your company? How are you answering her concerns on her terms? What have you provided as a communications platform to allow her to tell you how you are doing?
At The Lively Merchant we are focused on the future. We won’t waste you money on pie-in-the-sky wild ideas. More importantly we won’t waste you money on nearly worthless newspapers just because it is the way it’s always been done.
I haven’t passed a horse and buggy on the highway recently. Have you?
Recently I’ve had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with several retailers in a round table setting. We talk at ease about television and radio and newspaper, but I often get blank stares when I bring up the subject of online strategy, ecommerce, SEO, PPC, email marketing and other non-traditional media.
Many store owners tell me they still spend the majority of their advertising dollars on newspaper and other print media. In a recent industry-wide report, stores categorized as LOW PROFIT businesses continue to spend 34.3% of their marketing in print. These same companies are spending under .05% on all things web!?
Retooling is coming to a newspaper near you in the near future. The newspaper industry is in a free fall in every measurable category: 24 of the top 25 papers in North America declined in circulation in the last 15 months. The average decline in circulation is 20%. Advertising spending has dropped 7.5% overall, but the first quarter of 2009 saw a decline of 28.3% in advertising spending. There is a plunging reduction of $2.6 billion from just a year earlier. Scripps, Gannet, McClatchy, and the New York Times have all watched their stock price go to zero in 2009.They are bankrupt!
In the new book, The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield writes in Chapter 1, page 33; “Both print and broadcast — burdened with unwieldy, archaic and crushingly expensive means of distribution — are experiencing the disintegration of the audience critical mass they require to operate profitably. Moreover, they are losing that audience to the infinitely fragmented digital media, which have near-zero distribution costs and are overwhelmingly free of charge to the user. Free is a tough price to compete with. As documented by Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Throat’s advice to unraveling Watergate was to ‘Follow the money.’ To understand the current predicament, you must follow the no-money.”
Safeguarded opinion established in days gone by can cause you real problems in the days ahead. Ask yourself these questions from Garfield’s Chaos group:
Consider your own habits. Do you read newspapers as frequently as you once did, or do you get your news online?
Discuss the impact of Craigslist, Monster.com, and eHarmony on newspaper classified advertising.
If newspaper and magazine display advertising disappear, what alternatives will connect that audience to your brand?
If media institutions as large as the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) are in bankruptcy, is any mass media outlet safe?
How has the Internet changed the availability of content?
How did you get your news ten years ago? How do you get it today?
How much time do you spend connecting with your friends vs. consuming media? How has that ratio changed in the last ten years?
If you could no longer buy advertising on mass media, how would you connect with your customers?
Can you name any businesses that succeeded in stopping cultural shifts?
Can you name any businesses that successfully adapted to cultural shifts?
Is your company organized/equipped to effectively listen to its customers? What should you change or implement in order to hear them?
What are your customers trying to tell you? What are you doing about it?
Empowered business owners get to decide what they believe. Documented changes in business should not be avoided. Entrenched thinking might be more comfortable than the alternative, but without a planned strategy your future is bleak. When the newspapers themselves fail in your marketplace, how will you deliver you story?
Your customer is most anxious on your website when she’s reviewing her cart. The cart page shows the cart total for the items added and the basic price – but often doesn’t show the tax or shipping charges – thus begins the fear of the unknown.
Aside from price, the customer wants assurance that she’s getting what she wanted. For furniture, this is usually size and color, material, or wood finish at the very least.
Bad cart summary pages don’t provide enough detail:
The customer is interested in a lot more information about the product.
Do not be vague. Without a thumbnail image it’s near impossible to figure out what type of bed and which finish she is going to receive if she makes the purchase.
Excellent cart pages show the sku, color, large thumbnail images, availability, tax and include a shipping calculator pre-checkout.
Reduce her anxiety on the cart page, and you’ll reduce cart abandoment.
HIGH POINT — Three of the industry’s top technology specialists have formed a partnership to provide an e-commerce offering for retailers hoping to attract and serve consumers shopping on the Internet.
The partnership includes Colorado-based PROFITsystems, North Carolina-based MicroD and Ohio-based The Lively Merchant. Together, the companies have developed an advanced Web solution called e-Showroom.
The process basically allows retailers with no Web sites or Web sites that need improvement to get a turnkey enhancement. The process starts with an assessment of what the retailer really wants his Web site to do (The Lively Merchant) and continues through the creation of catalogs and room-planning capabilities (MicroD) and setting up a system to run it on (PROFITsystems).
While all three companies provide different technologies, “not one of us really provided the complete solution on our own,” said Shelley Parlin, PROFITsystems’ COO. “We thought that putting together the three companies that each excelled in a different area gave the clients the best opportunity for something that would really meet their needs.”
e-Showroom enables retailers using PROFITprofessional software to integrate and cross-reference their inventory with vendor catalogs and display them directly on their new e-commerce Web site, which runs on the ePiphany platform developed by MicroD.
“Through e-Showroom, our clients can establish brand awareness, increase traffic levels and maximize their advertising dollars by adding the equivalent of a second store without the building expense,” Parlin said.
Manoj Nigam, MicroD’s president, said the partnership “gives retailers the strongest possible solution” for establishing an effective Internet presence.
“We can help them connect to their customers and provide an easy-to-use shopping experience. Retailers will have control over their Web site, e-mail marketing and products shown without having to invest excessive time to maintain it.”
He said e-Showroom is a complete package that offers configurable and non-configurable catalogs, an integrated room planner, e-mail marketing system, free Web-needs analysis, Web site development, search engine optimization and social networking tools.
In addition, retailers will be able to select vendor catalogs or even have their own private-label catalog built so that shoppers can easily search through products without leaving the Web site and create wish lists or make purchases.
“Once the retailer has his site up and going, that retailer can figure out what the top 10 items are that are looked at on the site. Or he can look at what the top 10 companies are on the site,” said PROFITsystem’s Parlin.
“He may go, ‘Isn’t this funny? I deliberately put all my stock items on the front page but all the items people are clicking on and spending time with are on the third page. Maybe I should move those forward.’ We can actually get some analytics as a decision-making tool on what people are using the Web site for.”
While partnerships are not unusual for retail technology companies, three separate companies banding together for one purchase is unusual. Parlin said PROFITsystems has worked with both MicroD and The Lively Merchant in other venues so getting the three parties together was not so hard.
“It took a while to work out — who’s going to set it up; who’s going to support it; who’s going to do the billing? The relationship is working brilliantly.”
By Gary Evans — Furniture Today, September 21, 2009
HIGH POINT — Three of the industry’s top technology specialists have formed a partnership to provide an e-commerce offering for retailers hoping to attract and serve consumers shopping on the Internet.
The partnership includes Colorado-based PROFITsystems, North Carolina-based MicroD and Ohio-based The Lively Merchant. Together, the companies have developed an advanced Web solution called e-Showroom.
The process basically allows retailers with no Web sites or Web sites that need improvement to get a turnkey enhancement. The process starts with an assessment of what the retailer really wants his Web site to do (The Lively Merchant) and continues through the creation of catalogs and room-planning capabilities (MicroD) and setting up a system to run it on (PROFITsystems).
While all three companies provide different technologies, “not one of us really provided the complete solution on our own,” said Shelley Parlin, PROFITsystems’ COO. “We thought that putting together the three companies that each excelled in a different area gave the clients the best opportunity for something that would really meet their needs.”
e-Showroom enables retailers using PROFITprofessional software to integrate and cross-reference their inventory with vendor catalogs and display them directly on their new e-commerce Web site, which runs on the ePiphany platform developed by MicroD.
“Through e-Showroom, our clients can establish brand awareness, increase traffic levels and maximize their advertising dollars by adding the equivalent of a second store without the building expense,” Parlin said.
Manoj Nigam, MicroD’s president, said the partnership “gives retailers the strongest possible solution” for establishing an effective Internet presence.
“We can help them connect to their customers and provide an easy-to-use shopping experience. Retailers will have control over their Web site, e-mail marketing and products shown without having to invest excessive time to maintain it.”
He said e-Showroom is a complete package that offers configurable and non-configurable catalogs, an integrated room planner, e-mail marketing system, free Web-needs analysis, Web site development, search engine optimization and social networking tools.
In addition, retailers will be able to select vendor catalogs or even have their own private-label catalog built so that shoppers can easily search through products without leaving the Web site and create wish lists or make purchases.
“Once the retailer has his site up and going, that retailer can figure out what the top 10 items are that are looked at on the site. Or he can look at what the top 10 companies are on the site,” said PROFITsystem’s Parlin.
“He may go, ‘Isn’t this funny? I deliberately put all my stock items on the front page but all the items people are clicking on and spending time with are on the third page. Maybe I should move those forward.’ We can actually get some analytics as a decision-making tool on what people are using the Web site for.”
While partnerships are not unusual for retail technology companies, three separate companies banding together for one purchase is unusual. Parlin said PROFITsystems has worked with both MicroD and The Lively Merchant in other venues so getting the three parties together was not so hard.
“It took a while to work out — who’s going to set it up; who’s going to support it; who’s going to do the billing? The relationship is working brilliantly.”
Family man. Runs in the family. In the family way. Family tree. Family matters.
Americana is all about family. We’ve even stretched it to include our “work family” and our “school family” or our “church family.” Despite efforts to redefine it, we all have our own personal definition.
What does “family” mean to Ms. Jones? Are there always kids, or can it just be her cats? What if Mr. Jones took off with someone from his “work family”? What if there are kids, but they just jumped out of the nest? What if they’re still in the nest, but only for ten minutes at a time between sporting events and play dates?
Whatever you sell has got to fit into Ms. Jones family, however she defines it. Has the changing shape, size and style of the American family changed the way you do business? Has it impacted your assortment? Have the needs of your employees changed as their own families have changed?
How do you find out what Ms. Jones’ family feels like, so you can fill their needs?
If you can’t attend the Industry Wide Web Summit 3.0 in Vegas this afternoon, click here to watch the live webcast at at 1:00 pm PST (4:00 pm EST). You will gain practical, real world information and implementation strategies for all areas of electronic media and web for the furniture industry.
How to Implement Email Marketing and Social Media for Results | David McMahon | PROFITconsulting
Throw Web-Based Marketing Into Your Mix | Ron Carpenter | Strategic Marketing Solutions LLC
Demystifying the Online Furniture Shopper | David Lively | The Lively Merchant
Create an Engaging Website that Brings Your Brand to Life Online | Renee Loper | aspenhome
You CAN show and sell furniture online. We’ll show you how.
space
Monday, September 14, 2009 | Opening day of the Las Vegas Market
Building C | 9th Floor | Room C976 | 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Be sure to post toll-free phone numbers and e-mail addresses on every page, as well as fields for visitors to submit questions, says David Lively, whose Ohio consulting firm, The Lively Merchant, specializes in retail sales. Glickman says retail sites should also allow visitors to calculate shipping costs early in the purchase process so that they aren’t ambushed at the conclusion of the transaction.
The ability to send automated responses to visitors who have reached the shopping cart is also critical, Lively says. “You want to be able to send auto responses that correspond to the exact point where a customer exits the shopping cart before purchasing, a communication that says, ‘We saw you were considering purchasing so-and-so product. If there are any questions we can answer about that product…’”
Whether you sell generic widgets or provide a highly specialized service, your efforts are more likely to bear fruit if your prospects perceive you as a benevolent authority in your field.
To that end, Lively says, a well-written, informative and regularly updated blog not only can boost credibility, it can also hold visitors’ interest and reengage them in the shopping experience. Read more…
• Make the essentials accessible. The company phone and e-mail should be prominent on most every page of a site, says Jay Bower of the Crossbow Group. Sites with a shopping cart should also provide ready access to privacy policies, return policies and shipping info.
• Don’t demand too much information. “Only ask a customer or prospect for information you really need,” advises retail sales consultant David Lively. “Long forms are a source of frustration.”
• Let them buy first, join later. It’s important to give customers an opportunity to open an account, but only after the close, says Dave Nevogt, owner of e-tailer PurePointGolf.com.
• Remember: Less is more. “It’s a Facebook-driven world right now,” says Bower. You don’t want a site that looks text-heavy.
• Function well with any browser. The best sites accommodate all visitors similarly, whether they arrived via Safari, Explorer or Firefox.
• Be original. Don’t use a common template. Dare to differentiate with a site that looks and feels like no one else’s, says David Gass, who heads Business Credit Services.
• Keep the site fresh. Regularly update your content, graphics and so on, and don’t be shy about trying new stuff on your site (a blog or video, for example).
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Hypotheses
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
The single most important number that directly impact your profitability doesn’t even appear on your financial statements: Customer Satisfaction. Our Ask Ms. Jones™ process provides you with prompt, actionable information so you’ll know exactly what your customers are saying about you, which positions you as a problem solving expert armed with answers that can laser guide your store to the top of the heap.
In this morning’s New York Times I was struck by recent purchase of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field by the Ricketts family from TD Ameritrade fame.
In the new book, 
Family man. Runs in the family. In the family way. Family tree. Family matters.
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