Who Moved My Cheese? Literally! - 3 Tips for Better Customer Experience in Times of Change
We’ve all experienced the disorientation of walking into an unfamiliar grocery store. We’ve had to navigate signage and look up and down aisles to confirm if this retailer puts canned mushrooms where your retailer puts canned mushrooms. It’s vaguely unpleasant but expected.
Not long ago, I was on a quick pick-up trip to my local grocery store, a Safeway in San Francisco. I had maybe 10 things that I could think of that we needed, a few of them jotted hurriedly on a piece of paper, the rest left to recall. Walking the aisles would jog my memory for anything else that we’d need.
I grabbed a cart and entered. This would be a fast zip in and out to replenish. Twenty minutes. Tops.
I moved deftly through the produce section, picking up berries, salad greens, mushrooms, and bananas. A quick stop on the back wall for eggs, and I was off to grab spaghetti sauce. As I prepared to hang a left at the dairy case to head down the dinner aisle, I saw something strange out of the corner of my eye.
Is Soda Seasonal?
The seasonal aisle was completely filled with soda. The shelves where I had bought crushed peppermint for some holiday cookies just months ago, was packed with every brand of soda. “Could this be for a Super Bowl promo?” I wondered. “Could the soda aisle now be all the way down here on the opposite end of the store?”
Soda wasn’t on my list, so I refocused on getting the spaghetti sauce. Hot sauces and soup cans were my visual cues that I was at the dinner aisle where I’d find a wide range of spaghetti sauces three-fourths of the way down on the left.
But the sauces and soups were nowhere to be found. The entire aisle seemed to be filled with personal care items. What was going on? Where had the dinner section gone?
The next aisle would surely still be home to the baking section where I could get some chocolate chips. Baking was always firmly in the middle of the aisle just beyond the dinner aisle. Until it wasn’t.
“Oh no!” I thought to myself in shopper horror. “My store is in the middle of a shelf and aisle reset! This is a nightmare!”
I considered abandoning the mission and leaving but had too many items we needed. My only choice was to continue. I gingerly pushed the cart forward, trying to figure out where everything had gone. I felt like I was caught in a maze trying to find the cheese.
Cheese! Where was it?
As I continued along the dairy case, I was relieved to find the chunk and shredded cheese just a cabinet or two down from where it had previously been. But even then, the packages on the shelf weren’t in their familiar location. Instead of being ordered by brand, cheese was organized by flavor. What?!
I located my cheese, relying on the visual cues of the logo, package color and then the name to confirm I’d found the right thing.
Finally, I found the dinner and baking sections. They were in the same aisle. Together. What had once been separate was condensed into one. As I moved down the aisle, I couldn’t help but notice the other shoppers. They were staring at the shelves. Perplexed. “Where is it?” one woman asked her husband as she searched the boxes. “I don’t know. I don’t see it,” he replied.
When I located the chocolate chips, the confusion continued as brands suddenly were running vertically instead of horizontally on the shelves.
3 Tips for Better Customer Experience in Times of Change
After my shopping trip was done (it took an hour instead of 20 minutes), I remembered conversations I would have with shoppers during in-store intercepts on market insights projects. I would usually ask if the shopper had any feedback for the retailer we were visiting. Most people liked their store well enough but the one thing I repeatedly heard was how much they disliked it when the store moved the aisles around. They all said it took months to get used to. Now I truly had empathy with how they felt.
Product and aisle rearrangement is a regular part of retailing. Stores must re-arrange to make room for new items and discontinue the old or under-performing. Sometimes, like in the case of this Safeway, a store will do a full re-arrangement to accommodate a remodel as well as shifting tastes of consumers. It didn’t go without notice that while the meal and baking aisle shrunk in length, the chips, cookies, and soda aisles was now among the longest in the store.
Given that rearrangement is inevitable, I offer these three suggestions the next time the cheese needs to be moved:
Address the disorientation and help shoppers find their way
More than a “pardon our dust” sign, shoppers need help finding where everything is. Don’t rely on their good will to stumble through the aisles aimlessly. Shoppers are often on autopilot while shopping for things they buy frequently. While it may seem like a good time to promote “discovery” you risk generating “alienation” instead. How about some maps handed out at the entrance? Or staff up with some ambassadors roaming the aisles to help shoppers find what they are looking for?
Help new habits form
Shoppers must rebuild their muscle memory. Continue to provide easy cues to help them find their way. How many visits does it take before your guests are comfortable again? I can tell you from experience that it isn’t over after the first time.
Highlight what’s new
Go beyond fluttering flags in the parking lot. Show off what you did to the store, what new items or features do you have and how is that benefitting your loyal customer?
How can you use social media and technology to make this even easier? How about pushing some notifications to me when I’m in the parking lot or on my store app?
Despite all the changes, I’m still buying my cheese at Safeway. It’s convenient and has most of the brands I like. I don’t know where the seasonal aisle has gone but I’ve got a few months before I have to worry about that.
