The Ideas Are Out There

When Michael Relich was CIO of Wet Seal, a clothing chain catering to teenage girls, he used to hang out in stores to observe the customer experience - and earned a lot of suspicious looks from mothers shopping with their daughters. Telling them he was from headquarters helped diffuse the situation and gave customers an opportunity to offer an earful of opinions (mostly "Ohmigosh, the clothes are so cute!"). Relich was particularly interested in seeing how a new point of sale (POS) system he had installed in Wet Seal stores was working. "You always hear the horror stories, 'Well, the register went down or was so slow we had 20 customers queued up'," Relich says. "A lot of times that was exaggeration."

Although recent press reports suggest that Wet Seal is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy (the chain missed the trend among teens for cheap, disposable apparel), Relich did a masterful job of recognizing customer needs and applying IT to address those needs before he left the company to become CIO of Guess in May.

Relich, for instance, observed many Wet Seal customers asking if discounts were ringing up because they couldn't see the POS display monitors, which face the sales associate. These frequent Q&A sessions slowed lines. To remedy the situation, Relich worked with the POS vendor to show a running tally of the sale on the display panel of the credit and debit card authorization device.

Relich's store scouting expeditions - and the fact that he also ran e-commerce and thus read all customer e-mails - spawned other IT initiatives aimed at making customers happier. He noticed, for instance, that salespeople often didn't have the 10 minutes or so it took to call other stores to locate a desired item in another size or colour. As a result, the stores lost sales and disappointed customers. That observation, combined with online customer feedback, gave him the idea to develop a store locator function on the employee portal, which employees can access through any POS terminal. In 10 seconds, salespeople can now check the portal to see which other stores have the item in stock.

During store visits, Relich also observed boxes of new merchandise stacked in the back rooms of stores because salespeople were too busy to unpack and display the contents. That prompted him to put a shipment status window on the employee portal. Now managers use the window, which connects to Wet Seal's ERP system, to find out when to expect shipments so they can schedule enough labour to get the latest merchandise on the floor - and into customers' hands - more quickly. Getting into the stores allowed Relich to see for himself what customers were doing.

"It's much more effective than hearing it second-hand," he insists.

Leave Your Assumptions at the Office

In reaching out to your customers, be prepared to see some of your assumptions unravel. By getting out onto the front lines, Dare, for one, concluded that IT's practice of "dumbing down" technology - by installing simplistic touch screens, for instance - was unfounded. He also realized that Tussauds' city centre attractions draw different kinds of customers its theme parks, forcing him to rethink his strategy of providing both kinds of facilities with much the same technology. Dare observed that tourists in city centre attractions spent a lot of time buying souvenirs. At the theme parks, however, people were less interested in dawdling in the souvenir shops; they wanted to get back out into the park quickly to go on more rides. As a result, Dare installed more POS systems in the theme park shops so that visitors could be moved along faster.

At Sutter Health, Hummel and his IT staff assumed that doctors (whose average age within Sutter Health is 60) didn't want technology and that they'd baulk at security measures. But when they surveyed physicians, they found that the doctors were using E-Trade and doing online banking at home. In fact, the doctors wanted more technology; they wanted the convenience of accessing patients' medical records and lab results from home. But they were worried that shifting to an electronic records system would initially slow things down in the office. Although productivity did drop when Hummel's group gave doctors online access to medical records, within a few months things were back up to speed. Hummel worked with Sutter executives to make sure the physicians would not be punished financially for adopting the technology and temporarily seeing fewer patients. As a result, patient and physician satisfaction increased.