#192 Making your own service

Christmas Furniture

The retailer asks you to assemble your Christmas furniture. Do you see this as a cost or an opportunity?

A Five Minute Read

We all need new furniture for Christmas. A new bed or a new dining table. We go to Ikea and buy it “flat pack”. We are then asked to “do it ourself”, self assembly. We are participating in the production of our own retail service.

We all participate in the production of services. At a minimum we follow the script or obey the rules. A restaurant would collapse operationally if guests just walked in, sat down and started ordering whatever they felt like eating. Whether you call them social norms, rules or scripts we all obey them. We book in advance, turn up on time and sit where we are told to sit. We order from the menu and apologize if we want customization. Even if we are gluten free or lactose intolerant, we feel the need to apologize for our own illness.

Assembling your own furniture is something different. Especially if we need it “for Christmas”. We do not expect it from our retailers. We take the cheaper price but do we know what we are signing up for? It may be becoming the norm, but not now. Many innovations in “do it yourself” start off as novel but end up as normal. In the early eighties Citibank introduced their first automatic teller machines. These ATM’s had been custom designed to be user friendly. For example, they let you scan your card without letting go of it. Prototypes had shown peoples facing dropping when the machine “swallowed their card”. Despite all this effort branch customers would walk past the machines and join a line for a teller. Today the situation has been completely reversed. Going to a teller is the exception.

Who Gets the Benefit?

A recently published study took a novel approach. They suggested that for any such enhanced participation a customer has two thoughts. The first is what is in it for me. The second is what does the retailer or service firm get. In any such request to do- it- yourself there is obviously a cost saving for the service firm. Across industry sectors firms have been moving work from their own teams to the consumer.

The customer journey for flying has been completely revolutionized. Everything has changed from entering the airport getting to the gate. We no longer buy a ticket from a travel agent and join a line to get a boarding pass and drop our bag. Instead, we buy on line and print our own boarding pass or download it. We scan it to get into the airport and scan it again when boarding. We are now being asked to ticket our own bags and place them on the belt. The cost savings for the airline are huge. We get convenience, speed and a sense of control. We do not asked about the savings for the firm because this is the new normal.

The study found that there was a big possible negative perception, if customers thought that all the firm wanted was to save staff costs. This would be made worse if the amount of “work” needed was high. It was reduced if “doing it yourself” allowed you to customize the process to fit your needs. If the furniture could be assembled in different ways. It gave customers back a sense of control. It also helped if there were options to avoid having to do it. If you could pay to have your furniture assembled. Interestingly it looked like age had a negative impact.

Age and Participation

As we age our mind, body, senses and emotions do change. The changes may not interfere with our consumption. They may interfere with our participation. The instructions for the furniture never have words. Just an exploded diagram that even an engineer would have trouble with. The assembly requires manual skills of the highest order. Without glasses many of the fastenings are impossible to comprehend. Older people may have more emotional maturity, but will this stand up to the task? Older people do “look on the bright side”. They are more concerned about preserving their positive emotions. This should give them more tolerance when participating. At some point, however, avoiding the task may be the best defense.

Our satisfaction can be enhanced or reduced by our participation. The furniture assembly example is extreme but there are many lesser participation requests. If we can follow the script, we feel satisfied and attribute our success to ourselves. If the instructions and script are too complicated for us to succeed, we blame the firm. As we age our ability to particpate changes.

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