Saturday, June 18, 2011

Customer experiences are more complicated than they appear

This is a great example of understanding the complexity of the customer experience. I just bought eggs at CVS. Usually the expiration date is on the outside of the container. But because there are always one or two cracked eggs in each container, you have to take two or three out and find 12 that are whole. But if there are different expiration dates, you can mix up your own as well as the next persons.

So this company (not sure of the vendor) stamps each egg with the expiration date. They understand these two competing customer requirements (expiration dates and no broken ones) and were willing to spend a little extra on their packaging process to give it to them.

Salmonella is not pretty. I'm not sure a new container design would be better at preventing breakage. So a good tradeoff I think.