I posted about this way back when it happened, but I’m enjoying working from the mountains these past couple weeks, so the experience is in mind, and I figure it’s worth drawing your attention to it in a more formal manner:
Copper Mountain ski resort in Summit County, Colorado, is my mountain. I love it, so I’m partial to them anyway. If your kid brings home an A, he’s the smartest one in school. So, I may be inflating this experiene a bit. (I could offer them plenty of CX criticism, like why on earth do they close the Excelerator lift at 3:30 when there’s still plenty of skiing left to do up there?! But anyway.)
And, in reality, this example of GCXR is, fair enough you’ll see, a bit esoteric to us CX practitioners. But still, here goes:
In mid-March, as they do every year, they started selling their ski passes for next season. Yes, I know. I was still enjoying the mountain this year at the time, and things hadn’t even turned to slushy Spring conditions yet; already they’re on me for buying a pass for the 24/25 season. But okay, you get into that groove and expect it every year.
But at the same time, they also start selling something more precious than gold: Parking access.
You have to understand about Copper Mountain: Parking there is a nightmare. Now, perhaps this is another criticism, but in fairness, they’re kind of right there with everybody else who runs a ski resort as far as having parking issues, and I’m not sure I’d have a better solution anyway, so I understand. That said, what they do for locals (and, I suppose anybody else who’s willing to shell out the bones for it) is to sell a parking pass that covers you in any of the paid lots (of which there are several otherwise very expensive pay-by-the-day arrangements) for the season. Even though it’s expensive enough that I’m not even going to list the price here in this article, when you do the math, it’s a good deal if you go skiing there often enough. So, I usually indulge. And I was about to do so this year when I learned upon calling on the second day that they were available that they’d all been sold already.
Now, first of all, I felt validated. I always kind of thought that, at that price (did I mention it’s exorbitant?) I was some sort of crazy person to indulge like that. But one happy thing that came from it was to come to learn that I’m not the only crazy person, and in fact, there are enough of us to sell them out that quickly.
Nevertheless, I was a bit tweaked to not have a chance to make that happen this year. So naturally, being the CX guy that I am, I poked a bit…what’s the deal, folks? The agents on the phone were getting the inquiry a lot; so much so that they were directing people to send emails to the Customer care team, partly to plead our cases, but also to register our dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. So, I did so.
Then guess what happened. A couple days later I got not just an email, but also a direct phone call from someone from their Customer Support organization. She was calling me not to apologize (although she did), not to request more specific feedback (although she asked me for that too), but primarily to tell me that they had, in fact, opened up more sales for a very limited time, and was I still interested? Heck yeah! And what a great move to call me directly (they did so for others who’d reached out as well).
Now okay, perhaps this whole thing was a ruse…they feigned scarcity to drive up interest. (No, they didn’t increase the price at that point, which is good, because once you sell one kidney to be able to afford ski parking, well…) But that’d be a risky game considering the only people who’d fall for it are those who’re interested in it and therefore likely to buy anyway. Why risk alienating them with silly marketing games instead of simply having that many more for sale from the get-go? That didn’t make sense, so my guess is it’s all on the up-and-up. And yes, speaking of scarcity, there is a risk that selling more than they’d anticipated might actually lead to more irritated Customers if there end up not being enough spaces. Check with me next season and see how that goes.
As pleasant as that surprise was, the true Getting CX Right here is what happened when it was all over: I got the following email inviting me to participate in a survey regarding my experience:
In case you can’t see the image, it reads, in part, “We love athletes like you and would love your feedback. Some places may put your feedback in the denial binder, but we run it through a rigorous correctorgram and light a fire.” It goes on to offer a direct incentive to participate in the form of entry into a drawing for a stay at their resort, even putting it in clever and fun, sort of whimsical prose.
Clients ask me all the time how to increase the response rate for their surveys. Plenty of folks talk about incentivizing participation, and what’s in it for me approaches. Usually that’s received and interpreted by brands in a strictly transactional fashion which is why so many of them offer you a free $5 Starbucks card if you’ll take their survey, or a discount for their own brand (usually not enough to buy anything nice from them, but tantalizing enough as a marketing ploy to get you back in their doors again…one must question the ethics of it just a little). Others will do like Copper did here and offer a raffle for something of much greater value (I’ve still got my fingers crossed for a gift certificate from Helley Hanson I was teased with for filling out a Vail Resorts survey a month or so ago, tick, tick, tick..)
But that’s never what I mean when I talk about incentive. If you really want more responses, show them you mean it. I’ll have a whole article on this topic coming soon, but for now, look what they did here: They’re not simply saying that ‘your feedback is important to us.’ They’re throwing down a gauntlet in a way: Others will simply say they care, then toss away what you write in their survey. We will actually use what you’ve written to us to fix things you don’t like.
That’s a powerful message. It helps that it’s delivered in a fun and engaging way (all the way down to its transactional incentivization being cutesy), and the appeal to me as an “athlete” doesn’t hurt either. (Mind you, that isn’t simply a sop to my ego…it’s part of their brand: They call themselves “The Athletes’ Mountain,” primarily for all the Nordic teams they host for training and competitions, but also it’s grown to become part of their atmosphere and identity. Even if it’s not flattery, it’s pulling me into their brand as a fellow athlete. They’ve clearly never seen me ski!)
We’ll see what comes of it (Will they extend the hours of the Excelerator lift? That was part of my feedback!), but so far I’m much more inclined to think they are taking my opinion seriously…because they’ve said more explicitly that they do.
