Positive customer perception of the overall service provided is the “secret sauce” for success in any industry. People who patronize your self-service laundry may not remember all of the features of your facility, but they will always remember how being there made them feel.
Customers are psychological beings. They think, they perceive, they feel, they emote, they reflect, they formulate opinions and they react. And they tend to do this privately and subjectively by having internal conversations with themselves. Perceiving, thinking and feeling are very much a continuous private party for all of us.
I am always amused when the manager, owner or waitperson in a restaurant approaches a table of diners and asks if everything is “all right.” Research has shown that, because people generally prefer to avoid confrontational or unpleasant conversations, it is extremely unlikely that the answer to that question will be anything but the word “yes.” You see, people who are satisfied will certainly say “yes,” and people who are dissatisfied will likely respond the same way with full intention of not returning and having no reason to tell the truth since they have already made up their minds to never return in the first place. The same behavior occurs in self-service laundries – and for the same reason.
So, is it fair to say that “buyers are liars,” as the tired old axiomatic sales rhyme goes? Actually, not in this case. They simply prefer to avoid the subject, knowing that they have full control over not returning to the restaurant. The same behavior occurs in nearly all purchases we make – except when we purchase a product or service that has a long-term use implication and/or is expensive, such as an automobile, an article of clothing or a hotel room; in such cases, we will frequently express our dissatisfaction immediately.
Buyer psychology is a fascinating subject and is intensely studied in great detail by social scientists and marketers. The more you understand the psychology of your customers the better you can serve them. Therefore, you not only can retain them as customers but also increase the likelihood that they will spread the word synergistically to others about what a great self-service laundry you operate.
This may come as a major shock to you but customers really don’t give you much credit for having a parking lot and a room full of washers and dryers. They fully expect that. It’s a given. What they do give you credit for is how they are made to feel when they visit, and how they feel is a function of a number of interrelated, privately processed psychological components and perceptual events.
Did you know that most products and/or services that are purchased are actually motivated by emotion and simply justified with logic? It’s absolutely true. The bottom line is that emotion rules and “internal memos” from your emotion center to your brain have priority status over intellectual memos. For example, many people will consistently frequent a restaurant that is extremely overpriced and yet the food is essentially no better than other far more inexpensive restaurants simply because they are greeted by name and made a huge fuss over upon their arrival and during their dinner. Emotionally, they need the exclusive feeling their grand entrance produces, so they are willing to overpay significantly for their dinner. In other words, emotion over intellect.
Some people will purchase a very expensive automobile and, when asked what motivated their purchase, will answer that they were impressed with the superior engineering aspects of the car; however, in fact, their knowledge of engineering would at best fill a thimble. More likely, they purchased the car for the impression and the emotional admiration value expected from their neighbors when it is suitably “displayed” on their driveway. Again, the purchase was motivated by emotion and merely justified with logic. Hey, some people really need to be the hero of their own movie.
So, the more you appreciate and understand what makes people purchase laundry services repetitively on a psychological level the greater the likelihood of retaining customers and acquiring new ones because of word-of-mouth advertising.
While it is certainly true that people tend to frequent retail establishments, such as self-service laundries, that are in relative proximity to where they reside, it is also true that a lot of people will travel considerable distances and spend much more time and money on gasoline to utilize a coin laundry that better satisfies their psychological needs. This is true of all kinds of retail establishments because emotional satisfaction is a very powerful and driving force.
For example, our organization owns and operates a very large self-service laundry in Detroit, and we have regular customers from significantly outside of our conventional trade area. Of course, other laundries do as well. These individuals indicate that they travel a greater distance to utilize our facility because it just makes them feel more “comfortable” than laundries that may be, in fact, closer to them.
Your internal laundry signage is extremely important in sending messages to customers. If your signs are negatively written, as I have seen in many coin laundries – “No Sitting on Folding Tables,” “Absolutely No Smoking” or “ Absolutely No Overloading the Washers” – you are overtly antagonizing people by disrespectfully issuing direct orders with a negative overtone, and they will perceive it and react accordingly. I have actually seen a sign in a coin laundry that read, “No Children Allowed.”
Instead of these types of negatively toned themes for internal signage, how about: “For Your Safety, Please Do Not Sit On Folding Tables,” or “Thank You for Respecting that Our Laundry is Smoke-Free,” or “Did You Know Washers that Are Not Overloaded Will Get Your Clothes Cleaner?”
Instead of “Out of Order” indicating that a particular machine is inoperative, perhaps say: “Sorry… Temporarily Out of Order, But Don’t Worry, We’ll Remember to Fix It Promptly.” The message is the same but how it’s conveyed makes a world of difference and sets the emotional tone. As the old show business cliché goes, “If you wear the right costume, the part plays itself.”
All communication with customers, which includes (but is not limited to) internal signage, mail-outs, television and radio commercials, and face-to-face verbal communication with you or your attendants, must be carefully designed so as to spread good will as opposed to bad will. Remember that people tend to talk with each other about where they do their laundry; if your messages are not crystal clear in terms of content, the message can, as psychologists say, “degrade” in meaning when passed along from person to person.
An interesting example of message degradation illustrated to me in graduate school explains how in World War I an originally whispered message from the front lines of “Send reinforcements… we’re going to advance,” when passed back from soldier to soldier finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and four pence… we’re going to a dance.”
In my experience, there are essentially three kinds of laundry owners when it comes to designing internal signage and composing advertising copy – the ones who know how, the ones who don’t know how and the ones who don’t know they don’t know how. The bottom line is that to retain and gain customers it pays to know how.
There are, of course, many other aspects and features of your self-service laundry that have perceptual/emotional value to customers. Cleanliness, attendant friendliness and professionalism, hours of operation, parking lot cleanliness, vend pricing, the room temperature in your laundry, the amount of non-operating machines, available comfortable seating, soap shoot cleanliness, and the choice of snacks and drinks are some of them. I suggest you examine all of these and more to be certain they are structured and positioned to create “warm and fuzzy” feelings in your customers.
Understanding the “emotion-over-intellect” rule will most certainly help you become more successful. When emotion and intellect come into conflict, emotion always wins. The enormous value of understanding the importance of this rule in customer relationship building and management, quite simply, cannot be overstated.