What causes a customer to prefer one business over another when both companies sell similar products?
The answer may involve price or product selection, but customers also notice dozens of smaller signals during every visit. They observe the parking lot, store layout, wait time, employee attitude, lighting, cleanliness, sounds, checkout process, and how easily they can accomplish their goals.
These signals are called customer experience clues.
During our BMG 205 Customer Experience course at Washtenaw Community College, we were assigned a field-research project called a Clues Audit. The assignment asked us to become social science researchers by observing and comparing the customer experience at two similar businesses.
This project changed the way we look at ordinary shopping trips. Experiences that once felt routine became opportunities to study how businesses influence customer behavior, comfort, trust, and loyalty.
What Is a Social Science Researcher?
A social science researcher studies human behavior, society, organizations, and relationships using systematic research methods.
Social scientists may work in several fields:
- Sociology: Society, institutions, and social groups
- Psychology: Behavior and mental processes
- Anthropology: Human cultures and communities
- Economics: Decisions involving money and resources
- Political science: Government, policy, and political systems
- Human geography: Relationships between people and places
Researchers may conduct interviews, create surveys, observe behavior, collect data, compare patterns, and use their findings to recommend improvements.
Marketing and customer-experience research also use social science methods. When a researcher watches how customers move through a store or asks why they prefer one retailer over another, that person is studying human behavior in a business environment.
What Is a Customer Experience Clue?
A customer experience clue is any signal a customer notices during an interaction with a business.
According to customer-experience researchers Leonard Berry, Lewis Carbone, and Stephan Haeckel, clues are the messages produced by everything connected to the buying process. Individually, a clue may seem unimportant. Together, the clues tell customers what kind of experience they should expect.
Customer experience clues generally fall into three categories:
Functional Clues
Functional clues reveal whether the business performs its essential service reliably and competently.
Examples include:
- Was the correct product available?
- Did the prescription get filled accurately?
- Did the checkout system work?
- Was the order completed on time?
- Could the customer accomplish the purpose of the visit?
Functional clues answer the question: Did the business do what it was supposed to do?
Mechanic Clues
Mechanic clues come from the physical environment and objects customers encounter.
Examples include:
- Store cleanliness
- Lighting and temperature
- Signs and product displays
- Parking availability
- Music and background noise
- Shopping carts
- Drive-through equipment
- Aisle width and accessibility
- Website design and product photographs
Mechanic clues influence how customers feel about the environment, often before they interact with an employee.
Humanic Clues
Humanic clues come from the appearance, communication, attitude, and behavior of employees.
Examples include:
- Tone of voice
- Eye contact
- Patience
- Product knowledge
- Willingness to help
- Body language
- Professional appearance
- Enthusiasm or indifference
A business can have competitive prices and a beautiful facility, but one dismissive employee can still damage the entire experience.
How to Conduct a Clues Audit
A useful Clues Audit requires more than writing down whether the researcher liked the business. Personal opinions should be supported by specific observations.
The process includes:
- Selecting two businesses that provide similar products or services.
- Visiting each business under reasonably similar conditions.
- Observing the customer journey from arrival through departure.
- Recording functional, mechanic, and humanic clues.
- Noting how each clue affects convenience, comfort, trust, and satisfaction.
- Comparing similarities and differences.
- Identifying the impressions each business appears to create.
- Recommending realistic improvements.
The researcher should document what happened instead of making unsupported assumptions about the business or its employees.
For example, “The service was bad” is only an opinion. A more useful observation would be:
"The customer waited at the counter for seven minutes without being acknowledged while two employees continued their conversation."
That statement provides observable evidence that can be evaluated.
Donnetta’s Field Perspective: Convenience and Accessibility Matter
Donnetta’s customer-experience observations centered on a pharmacy drive-through.
A pharmacy drive-through offers significant value for customers with mobility limitations, health concerns, children, pets, or limited time. For Donnetta, who uses a walker, the ability to complete a pharmacy transaction without entering the store is an important functional benefit.
The drive-through experience can be evaluated through several clues:
- Whether the lane and instructions are clearly marked
- How quickly an employee acknowledges the customer
- Whether the speaker system works properly
- Whether prescription information is communicated clearly
- How accurately identification and payment are handled
- Whether the employee sounds patient or rushed
- How long the customer waits
- Whether the transaction is completed correctly
Even the dogs’ experience becomes part of the visit. Simon enjoys looking through the open window, and pillows help elevate him so he can see what is happening. That detail shows how real customers adapt a service to fit their household routines.
What appears to be a simple prescription pickup is actually a complete experience involving accessibility, safety, communication, convenience, and trust.
Dominique’s Field Perspective: Comparing Meijer and Kroger
Dominique compared the grocery-shopping experience at Meijer and Kroger.
Both businesses sell groceries and household products, but the visits did not feel identical.
At Meijer, the trip often begins with Donnetta using a motorized shopping cart while Dominique manages a separate cart for bottle returns. Their usual route begins near the dairy section and works back toward the entrance. The availability and condition of the motorized cart directly affect whether Donnetta can participate comfortably in the shopping trip.
At Kroger, Dominique may shop alone while Donnetta waits in the air-conditioned vehicle, especially during hot weather. Dominique typically shops for meats first before moving through the remaining aisles for products such as cereal, chips, crackers, soda, and shredded cheese.
These routines reveal several customer-experience clues:
- Store size and walking distance
- Motorized-cart availability
- Location of the bottle-return area
- Product organization
- Checkout efficiency
- Self-checkout design
- Promotional pricing
- Aisle accessibility
- Availability of frequently purchased products
- Amount of physical effort required
A business may carry the right products but still lose part of the household’s business if the physical environment makes shopping too difficult.
What the Two Perspectives Reveal
Donnetta and Dominique experience businesses differently because their responsibilities and physical needs are different.
Donnetta pays close attention to accessibility, comfort, employee patience, and whether the service allows her to remain involved without creating unnecessary pain or fatigue.
Dominique notices navigation, efficiency, product location, checkout systems, and the amount of coordination required to complete the trip while also supporting Donnetta.
Neither perspective is more valid than the other. Together, they reveal a more complete customer journey.
This is one of the most important lessons from social science research: people can encounter the same business but experience it very differently.
Accessibility Is a Customer Experience Issue
Accessibility should not be treated only as a legal requirement. It is a major part of customer experience.
Customers may need:
- Working motorized carts
- Wide and unobstructed aisles
- Accessible parking
- Seating near service areas
- Clear signs
- Drive-through or curbside service
- Employees who communicate patiently
- Easy-to-use websites
- Reasonable wait times
When these features work properly, customers feel included and independent. When they are unavailable or poorly maintained, customers may feel ignored, embarrassed, or forced to leave.
A business that improves accessibility is not serving a small side group. It is improving convenience for older adults, veterans, disabled customers, caregivers, parents, injured customers, and many others.
Applying the Clues Audit to Dee & Dee Brown LLC
The assignment also encouraged us to examine the clues our own business sends.
Dee & Dee Brown LLC communicates clues through:
- Poshmark listing photographs
- Product titles and descriptions
- Pricing
- Response time
- Packaging
- Shipping speed
- Customer messages
- Our website
- Social-media content
- Promotional cards
- Our personal introductions at events
Our functional clues tell customers whether products match their descriptions and arrive as promised. Our mechanic clues include photographs, packaging, website design, and visual branding. Our humanic clues appear in the tone, honesty, patience, and appreciation expressed through customer communication.
Customers are already conducting an informal Clues Audit every time they interact with us. They may not use that term, but they are collecting signals and deciding whether we are dependable.
Questions Every Business Should Ask
A business can conduct its own Clues Audit by asking:
- What does the customer notice first?
- Is the environment easy to navigate?
- Can customers with different abilities use the service?
- Do employees communicate consistently?
- Are signs and instructions clear?
- What causes unnecessary waiting or confusion?
- Does the business deliver what it promises?
- How does the customer feel when the interaction ends?
- Which clues strengthen trust?
- Which clues contradict the company’s intended image?
These questions can uncover problems that may be invisible to owners and managers who see the environment every day.
Our Final Takeaway
The Clues Audit taught us that customer experience is built through the combined effect of many details.
Customers evaluate what the business accomplishes, what its environment communicates, and how its employees make them feel. Functional, mechanic, and humanic clues work together to create the total experience.
Becoming social science researchers helped us slow down, observe carefully, compare evidence, and recognize that an ordinary shopping trip contains valuable business information.
For Dee & Dee Brown LLC, this lesson is especially important. If we want to create a dependable and welcoming brand, we must view every part of our business through the customer’s eyes.
Businesses are always sending clues.
The question is whether those clues tell the story the business intends customers to hear.
Learn more from Berry, Carbone, and Haeckel’s customer-experience research, Managing the Total Customer Experience.
About Dee & Dee Brown LLC: Dee & Dee Brown LLC is a veteran-owned mother-daughter business focused on e-commerce, entrepreneurship, education, digital content, and creating opportunities through resilience and lifelong learning.