alt Hacker NewsThe Power of a Free Popsicle (2018)
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My old accounting firm used to give you, when you picked up your taxes, a Crunch bar if you owed money and a Payday bar if you were getting money back. It was silly, but I still think about them every time I do taxes. I haven't used them in ~15 years because I quit the business I was co-owner of, but it's absurd how effective spending around a buck for candy bars was. We were spending something around a grand for business taxes, international taxes and US tax prep with them, so it was a drop in the bucket.
This reminds me of an Undercover Boss episode (I think for Cinnabon).
The COO had mandated no more than 30 seconds per customer so that the line kept moving.
When she went undercover, she realized that 30 seconds was barely enough time to ring up the customer, hand them their order and move on to the next customer. Great from an efficiency standpoint but terrible for customer relations as the cashier didn't even have time to say "Thank you for shopping with us!" or "How is your day going?" etc.
It's a good reminder that optimizing too much for one metric (e.g. line speed, short term profits etc) can lead to worse outcomes in the long term. On the flip side, a few extra minutes of time and effort from an employee can turn a "nice stay" into " we are customer FOR LIFE!"
This theory comes from what Kano calls delighters. In the 1980’s Noriaki Kano came up with the a product framework called the Kano model.
Touchpoints come in three ways. Delighters as already mentioned, a popsicle delivered to your room, or a chocolate on your pillow. Then there are performance needs. In the case of a hotel this could be the quality of the view, or the case of an employee the basic wage, and then next is the basic needs. Using the hotel example this would be something like the air conditioning.
You complain if it does not work, but nobody writes a review about how perfect the aircon was.
The problem with free is that people get entitled. You can see some examples in this thread.
"Everybody likes free. But free can be dangerous, too. Today's show is about what happens when you take something that was free and you give it a price. That is a highly risky move. And the damage can be enormous."
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cos...
Some excellent examples of this
- Danny Meyer (founder of Shake Shack and Eleven Madison Park) has a wonderful book about customer service [0]
- Derek Sivers CD Baby customer note [1]
- Rory Sutherland talking about San Pellegrino canned soda vs Fanta [2]
There’s a lot of value in making someone feel cared for.
Whether you do that with a popsicle or with the staff and infrastructure of a $700/night hotel room is kind of a wash.
>Transitions are the most undervalued and underexplored moments.
I remember when my tenth grade English teacher put the fear of God in all of us on the first day of school, then was a totally different, nice, and wonderful person for the rest of the year (apart from an incident with the substitute, a different story for a different comment).
She knew what she was doing!
Does DoubleTree still give you fresh-baked cookies when you check in?
for me the takeaway is more if I have a business what can I do for my customers like offer a free popsicle that can keep them happy and coming back cheaply
Speaking as someone on a salary. Idk.
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My wife and I, both now-retired former Microsoft employees, were discussing such a topic just this morning (in relation to a HN headline that will become evident in a moment). Basically, I was commenting that we both worked at MS in that brief moment of time that employees were treated really well, like they really wanted us to stay there. The beer at morale events was small, local breweries (Mac and Jack's, typically). The morale events themselves were on a regular cadence. More t-shirts than I had days to wear them. Need a new monitor? If it's been a few years, "go ask your admin", and one just shows up. Yes, we had private offices. Some big things, like the offices, but also a lot of little, popsicle-like things that added up to, "wow, I feel like they want me here."
Then the morale events started becoming less frequent. The beer went from local to Bud and Bud Light. Then according to my wife, it went from Bud to Kirkland (the brand you find at Costco). Morale budget went from $WHATEVER to $40/head/year. Even the employee stock purchase plan discount went from 15% to 10%. You can look up the famous "shrimp and weenies" memo at Microsoft. I was on board with that, we didn't need shrimp. But now they don't even get the weenies.
And now Meta is recording your every keystroke and mouse movement, and I'm sure if they even get beer, it's no better than Microsoft has. Employees seem to be viewed as a liability now, or at best, code-producing cows to be milked out there in the open office feed lot. I don't care how much it pays these days, I've tasted how it could be, and no amount of money would get me back. All because companies can't spend an extra $100-$200 on their >$200K employees.