Retail and vasectomies: expectations matter

Nothing will wreck your day faster than thinking you’re going to get one thing and getting another. That is, of course, if the thing you get is worse than the thing you were expecting. Whether poor shopping experience or routine medical procedure gone awry, the result of this is often the same: anger.

The correlation between missed expectations and anger became very clear for me on the day that I finally made sure that I wouldn’t be having any more kids. I know, I know, TMI, right? Yeah, sometimes it takes a traumatic experience to really bring a lesson home.

Let me proceed.

Getting, as my buddies call it, “snipped” has become a sort of rite of passage. Every year over 500,000 American men opt to get fixed - or rather, broken - depending on how you want to look at it. Either way, about five years after our second daughter was born, my wife and I decided two was enough and started looking at our options. As we saw it, there were methods affecting the woman’s body and methods affecting the man’s. We figured she’d done enough to her body having the children so I offered up my parts.

Before I went under the knife, I asked a couple of my friends about their experience with the procedure. One said he went to a doctor affectionately called “Dr. Snip" and reported that it was downright easy. A little painkiller, a little tug, a little smoke, and home with a bag of frozen peas to watch March Madness (note: while there’s no actual correlation between March Madness and vasectomies, it makes for a great story). Another reported much of the same: a local anesthetic, a bit of a pinch, snip snip, sew, out you go. Easy peasy.

Turns out a sample size of two might not have given me all the information I needed to set realistic expectations for myself about what was in store.

S-DAY (yes, that means Snip Day):

I showed up to my appointment early, checked in, and was led to a room where I changed into a hospital robe. There I waited - drafty and alone - for at least 20 minutes. I believe this was on purpose, and I almost got dressed and walked out. It wasn’t that I feared the procedure, easy peasy, right? No, it was just the simple fact that I was about to break something that worked just fine and maybe that wasn’t such a great idea after all? Right about then, a nurse knocked, entered, and asked me to follow her. I complied. This is when my expectations of the experience started to diverge from the experience I was actually having.

I walked barefoot, holding my robe closed, down the hall to an operating room. It was cold and featureless, no paintings, no pictures of anatomy, not even an inspirational cat poster. White, steel, and sterile. Another nurse was waiting for us and she asked me to ‘go ahead and jump up onto the table,’ eerily reminiscent of a sacrificial altar, situated in the center of the room. I complied. I’d come this far, I wasn’t going to turn back now. That’s when the doctor entered the room.

As I took in my surroundings, I couldn’t help but silently laugh at the irony of the situation at hand: me, laying on a thin piece of paper covering a cold, steel table in a completely white room, helplessly watching as three women conspired to divert the fruits of my manhood from an external to internal trajectory. What had I gotten myself into? I’m sure a slight smile touched my lips at the thought of this, but that smile was not returned by the doctor. It was all efficient business to her - which was cool with me. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I needed to be either.

Lifting up my robe, the doctor announced her intentions mere moments before she used what I’m guessing was a very long needle (I tend to look away when I know needles are coming) to administer the local anesthetic. I grunted in response, a little more pain than I was expecting but it was a needle and I know there’s a range of pain associated with needles depending on a multitude of factors. So far, this is about what I expected, but I can’t say the same about what happened next.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve been to the doctor, and the dentist for that matter, more than a few times and I am familiar with local anesthetic. I know it takes a bit for it to settle in and make things numb. I also know that, characteristically, most doctors will inject, wait, prod, ask a few questions, wait again if needed, maybe even and re-administer if needed, and then get to work. Nope. Not this doctor. Not today. I’m not sure if she had a backlog of patients waiting, or if she was in a hurry to get to lunch, or if she was gassy and didn’t want to expose us, but she was having none of it. The next thing I heard was, “Ok, you’re going to feel a bit of a kick,” and before I could question the choice of the word “kick” and what that might mean to me, I got my answer.

She chose the word “kick” because it was the most descriptive and accurate. Imagine a mule backing up to the table, aiming a large, pillow-covered rear hoof at your left testicle and repeatedly kicking you. Not a sharp pain, just a series of low, direct thuds. My initial grunt became a series of pained groans that eventually gave way to pained laughter and me declaring,“You’ve GOT to be fucking kidding me!?” To which the nurse on my left reassured me I was doing great and that it would all be over soon.

It got worse before it got better. But I’ll save you the rest of the details. Suffice it to say, the experience I got was not the experience I was expecting. And because of that, I was angry. Very angry.

I’ve been through worse pain in my life. I’ve separated shoulders, required various stitches, endured turf toe (much worse than you might think), gotten jelly fish in my eye, and lived through an “emergency” root-canal. None of those things made me angry. Why? Because in each of those cases, and others like them, I got what I expected to get. In the case of my vasectomy, I was expecting a pinch and got a kick, directly to my, ahem, repeatedly.

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Like I said, this experience brought the whole idea of customer expectations into greater focus for me. When people go in expecting one thing and get another, their experience is tainted, moods affected, and opinions changed – often irreversibly. So yeah, vasectomy? Bad shopping experience? Not all that different. And that’s actually what I want to get into now.

“Shopping experience,” or some other version of these words and ideas shoved together for clickbait purposes, is super hot right now. People have a lot to say about it. Some of us have lost sleep over it. We all want to find the *best* way to give customers an amazing retail experience that will get them offline and out of their pajamas (all people online shop in their pajamas, right?), and eventually give them a good enough reason to get into local establishments so they can experience all of the reasons they should “keep coming back for more.”

People are making great livings telling retailers how to exceed customer expectations and make them customers for life. There are books upon books written on experiential this and amazement that. Stories about popsicles and people in banana suits, t-shirts sold like cupcakes, and gastropubs in gas stations (I’m kidding about that one…or am I?).

None of this is bad. None of it is wrong. Giving shoppers amazing experiences is part of what you signed up for when you decided to become (or work for) a brand or retailer, and likely, it coincides with your passion for people and a larger mission at hand. So naturally, wanting to provide experiences that are consistently and authentically awesome is of top priority. You know it will grow the business. You know it will differentiate. You know it will start conversations.

But let’s be brutally honest here: most retail is not ready to do above and beyond. Most retail needs to focus on the basics. Most retailers need to do nothing more than meet their customers’ most basic expectations. And they need to do it fast before the expectations that people have of retailers gets so bad that no one wants to go there anymore. For many, it is obviously too late. For those of you who are left…

• Show your customers you can meet their expectations

• Do it consistently

• Then, and only then, can we talk about creating something that goes above and beyond

Because the sad truth is, if you do a great job meeting your customers’ already low expectations around retail, you’ll likely be ahead of the game. Of course, the goal is not to stay here; the goal is to eventually exceed…but you can’t throw glitter on a sh*t sandwich and call it chocolate, if you get my drift…

Fear not. things are not as bleak as they seem. There is work that you can do right now, starting today. It’s likely work that you’ve done in the past and part of why you are in business in the first place. So many retail owners and managers started in retail because they wanted to provide customers with goods and services that they believed in. They saw a need and stepped in to fill it with all the best intentions. But soon, they learned that running a business is hard, and some of those initial no-brainer basics on how to meet the customers’ expectations fell by the wayside. It’s time to put those expectations front and center again. Because every person who enters a retail establishment of any kind has expectations.

While we can agree that customer expectations are fluid and constantly changing, there are core boxes that need to be checked off every time. Nothing flashy, nothing “experiential,” nothing fancy. Just the basics.

Regardless of the industry you’re in (yes, this applies to all), your customers expect:

1. A clean and organized store

2. Knowledgeable and empowered staff

3. Reasonable pricing

4. The products they want are in stock or easily orderable

5. Easy checkout and easy returns (ok, that’s two, but they go together)

That’s it. Those are the basic things you have to get right.

Admittedly, there is a lot to unpack in each of those five points. But, if you can’t get those right, I implore you, don’t waste your time on flashy, experiential, bespoke, or other shiny objects. Get these five things right and you’ll not only be a step ahead of most of your competition, but you’ll be well on your way to creating an amazing, traffic-inducing experience, without doing anything extra special.

Ok, real talk:

How many of you are doing all five of these things mentioned above? I’m picturing a few hands going up. Great. How many of you are doing all five of these things well, every single day? In my mind’s eye, most hands have gone down. To the few of you with your hands still held proudly high… prove it. How do you know you’re doing all of these things? How do you know you’re doing them well? What do your customers think of your efforts? How do you even know what your customers think? What do your employees think? Some of this can be pretty subjective, right? What is an “empowered staff” after all? Do you really know what it means that your customers expect an “easy” checkout and return process?

There’s often a rift between what a retailer thinks about expectations and what customers actually expect. For example, in a recent study conducted by Oracle Retail, 57% of consumers report that they believe returning a product is a “complete hassle” or “could be easier.” On the other hand, an equal percentage of retailers (yes, exactly 57%) thought that returning products is “very easy.” So who’s right here? I’m not a “the customer is always right” guy, but… the customer is right.

As was the case with my misinformed experience with Dr. Efficiency in the white room with no curtains, presumptuous expectation + subsequent rude awakening is a classic example of “you don’t know what you don’t know.” It’s also likely a case of “I don’t really want to know any more about it anyway, so I’m not going to keep asking questions.” I mean, it’s easier to think that something is going to go smoothly and be relatively pain-free (in my case), or that you’ve already done what you can to correctly and comprehensively deliver on your intentions to meet customer needs (as is the case with retail owners and managers). But because many of us, for many reasons, wish to remain willfully ignorant of the things that could be difficult, we don’t always take the time to learn a little more and really absorb the facts – both good and bad.

For me, more research might have provided the information I needed to better understand that not all snips are created equal. I probably should have looked for my own local version of “Dr. Snip” instead of leaving it up to the scheduling nurse. A little more research might not have made my experience better, but at least I wouldn’t have walked out feeling so angry because I would have had realistic expectations going in.

For those charged with the success of any retail establishment, meeting your customers’ expectations is the least you need to do to stay in business. If you don’t know what those expectations are, you have no chance of meeting them. If you think you know what they are, but don’t know if you’re meeting them or not, you’re at risk of moving on and spending resources on things that don’t matter because you’re not ready for them. If you let either of those things happen for any length of time, you’ll likely be out of a job or out of business.

Fret not! (You knew this was coming). Retailwerx is here to help! Our job is to help you find out where you stand on the basics, not so you can have another strategy on paper, but so you can actually gain some momentum getting back to why you entered the biz in the first place. Whether you are a single store retailer, a national chain, or a brand with products in multiple channels, Retailwerx will study your customers, figure out what their expectations are, assess how well you’re meeting those expectations, come back to you with recommendations, and put together a plan to get you into action now.

We guarantee it will be worth it. Even if you are part of the .01% on point with taking care of their customers’ expectations every time (bravo!), we’ll help you look at the extra stuff, the shiny stuff, and make sure you implement it and manage it with integrity. For the others, Retailwerx will uncover the things you didn’t know about what your customers expect, and show you how you can begin meeting those basic expectations every time, starting now. It sounds small, but I’m here to tell you, it is not small. It’s the most important thing you can do.

So, would I have gone through with our chosen method of birth control had I had realistic expectations about the procedure? Yes, I probably would have. Sometimes people need to do things even if they aren’t pleasant. Is this whole vasectomy story a good metaphor for retail? No, probably not. But it certainly taught me a great deal about expectations and how important it is for them to align with reality if the shopper (or the patient) wants any chance at feeling good about the experience later. And, well, it got your attention, didn’t it?

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I wrote this for of my clients, AXIS Display Group, because so often we see retailers stretching out for something shiny and ignoring the basic things that will keep them growing.