Want to Put Your Customers to Work for You?

“This copy is confusing.”

“I go to the trouble of calling, then end up in voice mail.”

“Ordering from this company is just too much work.”

Are your customers making similar complaints about your catalog?

It’s surprising how many catalogers make their customers work too hard. From your catalog’s design to your contact center’s operations, whatever forces customers to work will reduce response rates. But when you do the work for your customers, your response rates go up.

“If customers have questions, they’ll call.”

I interviewed Connie, a career woman and mail-order shopper, about how she buys.

“I’m a gal on the go,” Connie explained, “and I like my clothes to be machine wash and dry. Let’s say I need a new blouse. I’ll pop onto the Web sites of my favorite catalogs, find styles I like, select a couple and place my orders.”

“What if the copy doesn’t list washing instructions?” I asked.

“Oh, then I just assume it’s dry clean only. That makes it a reject.”

“But if you like the blouse, don’t you call first and ask if it can be machine-washed?”

“Oh no,” Connie replied. “That would be too much work.”

Too many catalogers tell me, “If customers have questions, they’ll call.” Catalogers have used this statement to excuse data-light copy and unclear photos, as well as to explain their rationale for bypassing competitor comparison research among other things.

But is requiring extracurricular work from your customers really your smartest sales strategy? Your catalog should provide the information customers need to make buying decisions. What data must your catalog supply? It depends on your products and customers.

For example, apparel should list fit-and-feature information that’s not evident from the photos, such as the presence of pockets, location of a zipper on slacks, or if a jacket is cut boxy or fitted. Selling a laptop computer? List the types of ports, and the weight and size of the power supply. Sure, some customers will call anyway, but many more will shun that extra work, and you lose those extra sales.

What about customers who do call? How should you handle their questions?

“We’re here to help … and help and help.”

”Wow! Look at all the different bells and whistles on these backpacks,” I exclaimed. “How do customers decide which to buy?”

“They call us with tons of questions,” said Frank, the catalog’s president. “Our phone reps are great — very knowledgeable and experienced. The time those calls take can be frustrating, but if a customer’s patient, we can almost always close the sale.”

“What about impatient customers?” I asked.

“We do have our share of lost sales.”

Frustration, patience, lost sales: Frank’s catalog had made buying his complex products too much work for his customers. Only the most dedicated were making it to the sales-closing finale.

I interviewed Frank’s contact center reps, and as I suspected, most were fielding many of the same questions time and again. We identified a list of most-frequent questions we felt could be answered in the catalog before a customer placed that first call. Then we rewrote copy, added photo captions, comparison charts and so forth — whatever we thought would answer questions best.

The result? Increased response rates, and average call time dropped by 30 percent. So while sales increased, staffing remained flat, boosting profits. In this case, less work for the customer meant more sales and profits for Frank’s catalog.

“I was so busy, I forgot to look.”

Mary was part of our focus group. I watched her eyes as she scanned the mockup of a proposed catalog. I didn’t say a word.

“Oh! This basket looks good,” she said, smiling. “And it’s only $15. No, wait,” she paused, confused. “This copy says ‘box’ not basket. Where’s the price for the basket? Let’s see, the picture says ‘A’ — where’s the ‘A’ copy? There it is. What’s it doing over there? It should have been here, by the picture. What? $45! That’s too high.”

Mary looked restless and reached to turn the page.

I asked her, “Did you like the $15 box?”

She looked up. “I was so busy trying to figure out the basket, I forgot about the box.”

Labor distracts customers. Their only work should be to become so delighted with your products that they place orders. Ideally, your customers should be able to instantly find what they need without much thought. In a non-technical catalog (e.g., apparel, gift, food), a photo normally grabs the reader’s eye first. Then the eye often unconsciously moves to check the price.

You’ll be ahead of the game if you help your readers make “yes/no/maybe” decisions in split seconds, so they quickly can move on to other products they might like. Help them to linger on what’s fun, not on what’s frustrating.

Takeaway tip: One design trick is to link each copy block intuitively to its correct product image to eliminate the work of searching for the right copy. Such copy-image links include placing copy below or to the immediate right of its image, or wrapping the copy around its image when that image is an outline.

As you develop page and product headlines, callouts, captions and other creative elements, keep this uppermost in your mind: When reading your catalog, your customers’ workload should be minimal.

“Customers love our return policy. They use it all the time.”

Tom proudly explained his catalog’s generous return policy: “We’ll replace or fix it even if it’s beat up, broken, whatever, for up to 10 years. That policy puts us head and shoulders above our competition, so we love getting returns and proving to our customers how much we stand behind our tools.”

“Cool! For the expensive tools you sell, it’s really worth the effort for customers to return their old tools to take advantage of your great guarantee,” I said. “How many returns do you get for your old-tool guarantee vs. returns for other reasons?”

Tom turned to his latest merchandise returns report. “Let’s see … only 7 percent.”

No matter how easy you try to make merchandise returns, they still require work from customers. And that means you must do all you can to reduce the need for returns. Tom was so caught up in promoting his catalog’s great old-tool guarantee (which customers loved) that he forgot to look at the other reasons for returns (which customers hated) that were causing them needless work.

When Tom researched his other return reasons, he found customers ordering the wrong items due to confusion in the catalog (solution: rewrite copy). He found some items returned because they were not as expected (solution: take new photos). And he found wrong items being shipped (solution: implement new picking procedures).

After some operational changes, Tom saw a dramatic reduction in “bad” reasons for returns, more repeat customers (who were now getting the products they initially wanted), plus big cost savings.

“Your call is important to us, but we’ve gone home.”

”We don’t print our limited calling hours in our catalog, because we don’t want to discourage people from calling us,” said Sandy, the catalog’s marketing manager.

“But without an after-hours answering service, how do you handle the calls that come in after hours?” I asked.

“Our voice mail gives our hours and asks them to leave their phone numbers so we can return their calls. Then we call back the next day.”

“How many callers leave their numbers?”

“About a quarter. We figure the rest will order online or call back later.”

Despite improvements on the Web, many consumers (especially aged 50 and older) still aren’t comfortable actually ordering online.

Moreover, in talking with many mail-order shoppers during the years, I’ve learned that not listing your contact center’s hours near your 800 number is almost universally interpreted by customers as “24-hour ordering.”

When customers get a voice mail saying your contact center is closed, they’re irritated, because they’ve just done the work of calling but without any reward.

If a customer already has gone to the trouble of calling, don’t ask him or her to now do the extra work of switching to the Web or calling back. And avoid asking them to play phone tag with you when you try to call them.

Although Sandy rejected rolling her after-hours calls to an outside contact center (she felt the special training for her product line wasn’t conducive to outsourcing such services), she implemented these steps:
- juggled staffing shifts to increase contact center hours;
- listed those call hours on the order form;
- added “see order form for hours” near the 800 number on each page to reduce the irritation factor of after-hour calls;
- improved the ease of Web checkout; and
- heavily promoted (in the catalog) 24-hour Web ordering.

The result: more during-hours calls, fewer after-hours calls, an increase in Web orders and an increase in overall orders.

In short, don’t make your customers go to work for you. Instead, do the work for them. And watch your sales increase.

Susan J. McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a full-service catalog agency and consulting firm based in Portland, Ore. She can be reached at (503) 286-1400.