Beware the Customer Empathy Gap!

Back in the ‘80s, my husband and I did a lot of outdoors stuff – we went trekking in Bhutan, kayaking in Alaska. We wore Patagonia gear because it was the best, and we knew it would help us do better or more safely whatever it was that we set out to do.

After being a fan, I became an employee. I worked at Patagonia in Ventura in the early ‘90s. It was a company full of true believers who didn’t need to do customer research because they were the customer. They called themselves “dirtbags” – people who couldn’t afford to pay retail and were totally accomplished in the sport, whether it was fly fishing or surfing or mountain climbing. Dirtbags were the opinion leaders who set the tone for what was cool in their sport.

All that’s to say that a recent Saturday interview in the NY Times called "Companies from Mars, Customers from Venus" rang totally true for me. The interview with Dev Patnaik, CEO and Founder of Jump Associates in San Mateo, describes the Empathy Gap –the chasm between employees in organizations and the people they serve.

In my experience, the empathy gap is real. Many companies began as Patagonia did, with its employees' finger on the pulse of its customers, which ensured alignment between company and customer. However, as companies grow, the demands for staff often results in hiring smart, capable employees who may not be or understand users. If they’re not careful, these companies can easily fall into the Empathy Gap.

All of us can name brands that don’t “eat the dog food.” Here are four on my list:

1. Stub Hub – this internet business has a lousy user interface and my own poor sell through experience suggests that though these guys may indeed be sports fans, they have never tried to sell anything on theirs vs. competing sites. I’ve never managed to sell ANYthing on Stub Hub!
   
   
2. QVC – useless junk hawked by a few earnest people and a bunch of smarmy ones
   
   
3. The Yankees – overpaid, cocky cry-baby players, overpriced tickets, nothing for regular folks who actually love the game and want to root for players they can call heroes.
   
   
4. Wells Fargo – nickel and diming, tell you with a straight face that they have to charge you for having a savings account. Does anyone who works for Wells Fargo actually pay these fees? Doubtful. Most likely, they have special accounts and get special treatment.

Large companies aren't automatically in the Empathy Gap. Even though I’m not a fan of the world’s largest retailer, I have to admit Wal-Mart walks the talk. To my surprise, the company ditched its efforts to move up market, which risked alienating its core audience. And CEO Lee Scott has publicly committed the company that democratized consumption in the United States — enabling working-class families to buy former luxuries like inexpensive flat-screen televisions, down comforters and porterhouse steaks — to democratize environmental sustainability. Wal-mart knows that efficient operations use less energy and produce less waste, and they're going to get the rest of us to make similar changes - helping us align our own priorities and actions. Kudos to them.

For brand managers where the empathy gap exists, here’s a flash: Get to know your customers…fast. While you’re taking them for granted, someone else is trying to take them from you!

Secondary Ticket Sales - What An Experience!

Forrester recently estimated that US online secondary ticket sales will grow at a 12% CAGR over the next five years to $4.5 billion by 2012. That’s a lot of tickets! Now, my family is a baseball family. We have season’s tickets, which entitles us to 81 home games a year – far more than even our baseball-crazed household can attend. As a result, I’ve had personal experience with several different ways of selling tickets to total strangers. Here’s my take on the options.

E-Bay wins hands-down. And I don’t mean Stub Hub, which was acquired by E-Bay. I mean good, old-fashioned E-Bay. (Has E-Bay ever been described as "old-fashioned" before?) Nothing can beat it for ease of use, intuitiveness of processes and tools, and success rates!

Stub Hub is in a word … lousy. It’s hard to use, their seller notification doesn’t seem to work nor does their tool for tracking action on your listings. We don’t know why Major League Baseball chose them as their one and only sanctioned means of reselling tickets. From the cheap seats, we think it's a good thing for E-Bay to keep its brand separate from Stub Hub.

Craigslist is such a mess, I have never tried to sell tickets (or anything else) there. I keep looking at it, and wondering how anyone sells anything there given how disorganized it is. Craigslist sellers, please tell me how you do it!

There’s always person-to-person sales outside the venue. That’s become harder to do as cities have cracked down on scalping. I do get a kick out of haggling with the scaplers themselves – you know, the guys who stand on street corners and are both buying and selling tickets to an event. They are a hoot, and they’re business people, like the rest of us. They have the seating plan committed to memory and know the going rate for any seats at any time leading up to an event. I had to laugh when one of them didn’t like the below-face value price I was asking for 2 tickets and exclaimed “Lady, you’re scalping!” No duh.

So, for my money, when it comes to selling to strangers, it’s E-Bay all the way.