Great Servicescapes: Shear Madness

I get bored during haircuts. Maybe it’s the boy in me, but I still see my regular trip to the barber as a necessary evil, something to be put off for any good reason.

I can’t imagine being 5, or worse, 2, and having to endure twenty minutes in a barber’s chair.

Luckily, my boys have a great service environment to have their haircut encounters.

Shear Madness takes what could be an almost interminable half hour in a young man’s life and turns it into enough fun to ask for by name.

The experience was created as seen through the lens of its customers. Chairs are various forms of transportation, from a Blue Angels fighter or NASCAR replica to a Malibu Barbie Corvette. Every station has a dedicated TV that plays a variety of children’s programming all day, every day. Kids don’t like Dora & Spongebob? TV’s are Playstation-equipped so that young customers can play video games while their hair is cut. Because we don’t have video games in the home, my eldest son thought until recently that the barber was the only place they existed. “I wish I could get my hair cut every day” is not a phrase I have ever said, much less when I was five.

It’s not revolutionary.

But if you can remember the excruciating experience of going to the dentist when you were young, having all manner of pokes, prods and poor tastes and then being “rewarded” with a sucker upon leaving, you’ll admit that it is innovative.

They’ve picked their customer - I can’t overstate how important that is - and oriented the experience to them, making the experience consistent from the front door to the chair and back. Their focus is resolute enough that they get their testimonials from their child customers and the parents who share the experiences - and pay the bill.



They’re not catering to everyone. I suspect by the time my guys are ten, they won’t care for it any more. Maybe they’ll think it’s too childish. (Though I wish I had entertaining distractions while tending to my regular grooming even now)

But there’ll be a lot of haircuts between now and then, and they’ll get most of them.

A 'free skate' on customer roles.

This weekend, I watched my 5 year-old cruise easily through skills test his first formal skating class.

I wasn’t surprised, but not because I see in my son a budding Gretzky. He enjoys skating and puts effort into the activity – in formal practices, when we skate together recreationally and on his own. (An aside, I highly recommend Talent Is Overrated for terrific reading on where "innate ability" actually comes from.)

I mention all this because skating lessons, like any form of education, represents an experience where the customer role is generally greater than the role of the service provider. It’s the extreme example that proves that while different services have varying levels of commitment, all have a role the customer must know, accept, and be willing & able to perform. Without these, the ability to create successful outcomes is substantially diminished.

Proper attention to customer role is one of the more neglected aspects of service businesses. Companies invest in employee training, employee process and employee-enabling technology, but too seldom make the same investments in customer training, productivity & quality.

The result: companies know their role exceedingly well. They execute their role in the encounter, and feel that their outcomes are generally successful. From this vantage point, when failures occur, it is usually because the customer hasn’t performed in their role correctly.

To begin understanding the gap between customer role and performance, start by asking (and getting customers to help answer) questions like:

What is the customer role in delivering a successful service experience?

How well do customers know the impact their role has to a successful outcome?

Are customers willing to perform their role?

Do they have the knowledge, tools and abilities to perform their role reliably?

Answers to these questions help guide us to decisions that make customers higher performers on the part of the encounter that they fulfill, whether it be educating customers on their role, giving them tools to fulfill it, redesigning processes to make their role simpler / smaller; or making the outcome more appealing.

My son’s skating lessons are a successful service experience because he knows his role (mainly practice) and has the tools to perform it (mostly ice time). He values the outcome highly and performs his role accordingly. Understanding customers' varying knowledge, willingness and ability to perform their service roles helps make improvements that lead to more successful encounters.

Several of these things are not like the others.

Last month, I posted on Children’s Mercy Hospital and how they effectively used the physical environment to create expectations, facilitate the service exchange and differentiate it from other care experiences.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit a specialist clinic considered a branch location of the hospital.

Great care once again, but a completely different experience.

The physical environment of the main location was not nearly as evident as it was the main hospital. Though partly due to working out of a leased space vs. the owned environment sculpted to fit the strategic service vision, the effect was evident throughout. The staff was not visibly oriented to perform child health care, making it feel like a regular, every day clinic.

Providing consistency in service experiences is tough. Operating from multiple locations makes it even more difficult, adding differences in the experience from location to location. Even if the quality of outcomes is consistently high, an inconsistent experience diminishes the reliability of the brand promise.

To combat the effect that location-to-location differences have, the “keep it simple” mantra works well.

If the experience is going to be managed centrally, focus on replicable aspects. Standardize core service processes, while giving front line service employees the ability to work outside process to stay true to the spirit of the service. Create uniformity of the service philosophy through how internal service providers, performance measurement and front-line hiring principles, and consistent internal brand messaging. Where service-enabling technology is used, implement system-wide.

There was no outcome failure. The care given by the branch of CMH was consistently exceptional, but because the location had less focus on the unique needs of the child customer than the main branch, I left with a diminished opinion and future expectation of the brand.

Just give the kid a toy already.

In any child-oriented service experience where the objective is repeat business, the service provider should give their child-customers some tangible evidence of the positive experience.

It doesn’t have to be expensive – just a small token that prolongs the experience by making it tangible once the child is out of context and serving as a memory trigger of a positive experience.

Many companies providing service experiences for children line their walls with merchandise and wouldn’t think of giving anything away. I can almost hear them rationalizing that “It would interfere with their merchandise sales and suboptimize revenue from the retail side of the house.”

Chuck E Cheese gets this concept, as every child leaves with something. Something of nominal value, to be sure, but a reminder doesn’t have to be expensive. Even the dentist hands out a lollypop at the end of a checkup.

Too many companies miss this easy opportunity to create repeat business in young customers. Experiences that have separate service and retail operations (themed restaurants, child hair salons) are the worst. It would take almost nothing in incremental cost to add a memory device to extend the experience and provide a positive reminder.

A child won’t want to come back if they can’t remember how much fun it was to be there in the first place.