Reflect Takes It Personally
Monday, March 13, 2000
by Mark Hurst; Best Practices column by Christine Yu
Last week Creative Good published a column about Reflect.com, the new beauty site from Procter & Gamble. (The column appeared on our E-business Best Practices site, which is co-produced and hosted by ZDNet.)
In the column, we describe the poor customer experience in Reflect's survey of first-time customers. Reflect's senior management, via phone and e-mail, has made it clear that they are unhappy with the column, saying they "are convinced [that Reflect] is a revolutionary concept."
I don't disagree. Reflect's one-to-one marketing is a "revolutionary concept" that the Net has been promising for some time. Yes, one-to-one will come to fruition -- but slowly, and not in the form that industry hypesters originally promised. (Most buzzwords either follow that arc or fail outright.) Until then, here's my own revolutionary concept: let's stop promising revolutions. Reality is so much more interesting than hype.
At any rate, our column on Reflect is only concerned with the survey for first-time users -- not the overall concept. With this and other surveys, Reflect.com requires first-time visitors to trudge through 25 pages, twenty-five pages, before they're privileged to see the first product on the site. Perhaps if the customized product made it to the customer's door, Reflect's concept would be more attractive. But the point is that many customers will leave the site before they get to the final page in the process.
With a long, slow, overdesigned, complicated customer experience, Reflect must either change radically or become a memory (like slow, overdesigned Levis.com).
Below is our Best Practices column on Reflect:
Reflect.com
Date of Evaluation: 11 Feb 2000
How to Get There:
1. Go to www.reflect.com
2. Click on "begin your experience" in the center of the page
Summary: Reflect.com takes personalization too far with its forced
customer survey.
Reflect.com, a beauty e-commerce website, focuses on creating a total
beauty experience for customers. The Procter and Gamble spinoff proposes
to create a website and products suited to each individual customer.
However, Reflect takes customization too far by forcing customers to to
personalize the website in order to shop.
Reflect does not allow customers to opt out of the survey and to begin
shopping from the home page. Instead, all new customers must follow the
*new visitors* link that takes them to a registration form and survey.
Customers coming to the site for the first time may become frustrated and
leave the site because they can't shop immediately.
Those customers who do continue with the survey face questions such as
"If I were a house, I would be" with answer choices ranging from "A
beautiful mansion filled with art and the hottest artists" to "A
maintenance-free townhouse with an exercise room." Other questions
include "The person closest to me would say I am most likely to dream
about."
Reflect's survey might even be tolerable if it actually led shoppers to
customized products. Unfortunately, the only purpose of the survey is to
customize the site's colors and images. Some customers, for example, will
view the site with purple flowers while others will see it with yellow
ones. To actually customize *products*, shoppers must go through yet
another survey when they finally access the site.
Reflect claims to create the ultimate experience for customers with a
personalized website and beauty products. In fact, it creates a bad
customer experience. Reflect is more concerned with the design and feel
of the site than with providing a simple shopping process for customers.
Here's the same column on our best practices site.
Thanks to Creative Good analyst Christine Yu for writing such a good column.
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