Do you use technology to optimize for customers?

Recently, I wrote a couple of posts on whether we are optimizing our sites for search engines or customers. I’d like to return to that theme and show an example of a company that is using its site to optimize for customers, and in so doing, helps themselves, too. PeaPod, for those who don’t know is a leading grocery delivery business owned by Stop & Shop, and you might learn a trick from them.

Image via Wikipedia

This optimization offered by PeaPod isn’t around anything really exciting, but about the truly mundane: delivering groceries.
If you’ve never used an online grocery service, you might not have thought about how it works, but thousands of customers use PeaPod to deliver groceries to their homes when they want them, some several times a week. So, after they’ve loaded up their shopping cart, customers select from dozens of time windows for the delivery in the next few days.
PeaPod shows a list of times, which you’d expect, but they also do something you might not expect. A couple of those times alert the customer that selecting that time wil cut $1 or $1.50 from the delivery fee. Now, I don’t know for sure why some times are discounted, but I can guess that it might be PeaPod is trying to fill the schedule for that truck. I don’t know how sophisticated the algorithm is, but it might be more aggressive about offering discounts as the time gets closer (the same way airlines maximize revenue per seat based on load). It’s better for PeaPod if the truck leaves full with a full delivery schedule, just as no airline wants a plane to take off with an empty seat it could have sold, even at a steep discount.
Sometimes, PeaPod offers even larger discounts—as much as $3 off the $10 delivery fee. It’s possible that PeaPod is giving discounts because the particular customer is proximate to another house that has a delivery at that time, so it costs almost nothing in time and gas to deliver while they are in the neighborhood.
You’re probably not in the grocery business, but how could you use this idea? Many businesses must schedule deliveries or other appointments for repairs and other home visits. Today this is largely a hassle for the customer, where they must be home for an entire day or half a day and the fee is the same no matter when they do it. Most companies do this because after they have all the locations lined up for the day, they plot the most efficient route that saves the most time and gas.
Suppose you did what PeaPod seems to be doing, and offered discounts for people to choose less popular times of day (to fill your schedule) or times when you have another call nearby? Suddenly, because you are cutting customers in on a reduced fee, they suddenly are less frustrated about the inconvenience, because you’ve made them part of the process and given them some control over their schedule and their costs.
Take a hard look at your own policies and procedures and ask yourself if you are doing things the same old way. Could technology be applied in a new way to optimize your process for you and your customers? What wasn’t possible just a few years ago is cheap today, so don’t let old thinking stymie improving your customer’s experience.