Anticipation

Here's a great blurb on the customer experience for purchasing a Mini Cooper:

So high is demand for Minis that the waiting period for a customized car (which account about 95 percent of those sold) is now generally in the 8-to-12 week range. So, Mini (which calls its dealers "motoring advisors") keeps its waiting customers happy with "Make Waiting Fun" welcome kits that "include retro 1950s games like Interstate Highway Bingo" and a "Mini Parking Only" stencil. Mini also created the "Where's My Baby" program online, which enables waiting buyers to track the progress of their cars, and a bulletin board where waiting -- as well as existing -- owners can exchange questions and share their experiences. The site has attracted some 12,000 registered users, most of whom seem to have "named" their cars. The real payoff, though, is the viral effect. Notes John Stramatos of Nissan, who stays in touch with long-waiting 350Z, www.z.com, buyers via postcards and coffee-table books: "Those people bring in other customers."

The Mini team understands that the period between purchase and delivery is a crucial one for customer satisfaction.... this principle applies whether you're selling cars or phone lines. In the telecom world, customers must wait for installation of a phone or internet line. Often there's a breakdown in the hand-holding process; customers want to know when they're getting their service and make numerous calls to find out the status. This creates a burden on the inbound call center and frustration for the customer. One of my clients is working on a web interface that will show a barometer for the status of T-1 installations, which is often a 45 to 60-day process. They're also creating a scheduling desk to make proactive communication with customers about the status of their order.

If the purchase process in your company includes a waiting period, what can you do to alleviate 'buyer's remorse' and create anticipation?

Comments

[Robert Castelo]

I'm so impressed, what a brilliant idea!

Some clever marketing person has realised that waiting for a product/event can actually be exciting. It's a lot like an advent calendar, where you open a window every morning in the run up to Christmas.

The crucial element is a reliable delivery day. We know Christmas Day is on 25th December, our excitement is geared towards that day, if it's postponed because of delivery difficulties, excitement turns to frustration and sours the experience.

I think this is such a powerful marketing method that it will be very widely used in the future, but only companies that are on the ball with their deliveries will make it work.

[Tonetheman]

This is the type of stuff that Information Technology fails at miserably (in general).
For large IT projects the handholding starts after all specs have been taken. Sadly though at least where I have worked in the past and even now, there is a gap that starts at the end of the specs and leads to problems with what is wanted vs. what is delivered.
This all boils down to communication with customers and in IT's case we do it really badly.

[Damon B]

Not to drive users away your wonderful site, but I just saw (and printed out for later reference) an article on NYTimes.com about this very topic. You need a userid and password, but you can check it out here.

I've got to figure out a way to incorporate this into our business.

[John Moore]

Yikes, that is clever stuff. We hear a lot about "consumer insights" but this is a rare example of a good one. Instead of apologising for, or just ignoring, the possible downside of an 8 week wait, they actually engage with the experience.

[David Foster]

This is pretty impressive because...generally, when a product is in such high demand that there's a waiting line, the producer becomes fairly arrogant and pays *less* attention to the customer experience, not more.

I would be that somewhere in the mini marketing organization there are some execs who have known bad times, remember what they were like, and want to guard against a recurrence...