Chapter 2 - The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction
Chapter 2 - The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction
Chapter 2 - The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction
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8 Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
1. A perfect product
2. Delivered by a caring, friendly person
3. In a timely fashion
. . . with (because any of those three elements may misfire)
4. The support of an effective problem resolution process
A Perfect Product
Customers want defect-free products and services. You need to design
your product or service so that it can be expected to function perfectly
within foreseeable boundaries.
Things will sometimes go wrong. Your products, and people, will
sometimes fail due to unpredictable circumstances. But sloppy or in-
complete product or service design is, from a customer’s perspective,
intolerable.
Suppose you’re staffing an online photo lab. Let’s call it Stutterfly.
You know from experience that one prepress technician (PPT) is
needed for every 100 orders in-house. Now suppose you want to be
ready for a maximum of 1,000 photo orders at any given time. How
many prepress technicians do you need? Ten? Perhaps. But a ‘‘perfectly
designed’’ answer needs to take into account absenteeism, last minute
no-shows, and vacation time: any reasonably foreseeable scenario that
could prevent you from actually having ten PPTs on hand to cover the
orders in-house. In addition, your ‘‘perfect design’’ needs to include
provisions for getting these technicians all the supplies, tools, resources,
and information they’ll need to do a great job.
Of course, something that is not realistically foreseeable could still
happen: six of your ten PPTs might get the flu on the same night, or a
major earthquake could knock a paper mill that supplies you out of
commission. The product will not always be perfectly deliverable. We
know.
The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction 9
So you stand there, waiting for her to finish the previous transac-
tion.
Finally she finishes keyboarding, looks at you, and says curtly:
‘‘Yes?’’
You answer, ‘‘My plans have changed. Would it be possible to ex-
change this ticket so I can fly to Washington Dulles?’’
‘‘Uh huh . . .’’
She takes your ID, gives you your boarding pass—and never looks
up at you.
‘‘Next!’’
You take the boarding pass, go through security, get on the plane,
and land safely and on time at your destination. So, you got a perfect
product: a product that would appear, if anyone charted it out, to be
100 percent free of defects.
But do you feel satisfied?
Of course not.
OK. Now let’s change the script. Same airport, same maze, same
line of people ahead of you in the maze. Again, you eventually make it
to the front of the line, where you quietly wait for an agent to call on
you.
‘‘May I help the next person in line, please?’’ (You step forward.)
‘‘Good morning, Sir. Thank you for your patience. How are you today?’’
‘‘Not bad at all, thanks, considering, and how are you?’’
‘‘Just fabulous. How may I assist you today?’’
‘‘My plans have changed, and I need to get on a flight to Washing-
ton Dulles.’’
‘‘It’ll be my pleasure. I hear the weather isn’t actually too bad in the D.C.
area this weekend. Are you visiting family for Thanksgiving?’’
‘‘No, it’s just business. But I’ll be flying back right afterward and
will get home for the holiday.’’ (She checks your ID and hands you
your boarding pass.)
‘‘Is there anything else I can do for you today?’’
‘‘No, I think that’s all.’’
‘‘Well then, have a splendid day.’’
The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction 11
In a Timely Fashion
In our world of iPhones and IM, your customers get to decide what is
and isn’t an appropriate timeline. A perfect product delivered late by
friendly, caring people is the equivalent of a defective one.
Customer experiences guide their expectations, so on-time delivery
standards continue to get tougher all the time. What your customer
today thinks of as on-time delivery is not only stricter than what her
parents would have tolerated, it’s stricter than what even her older sister
would have tolerated.
Amazon.com’s tight supply and delivery chain has single-handedly
raised the timeliness bar in the online world, but that’s not the end of
the story: Their speedy online delivery has raised offline expectations as
well. In fact, the concept of special ordering for walk-in customers is
obsolete for most brick-and-mortar merchants. If you don’t have it in
stock when a customer walks in, a customer’s just going to go online
and find it for herself.
This impatience rule can only be disregarded when a customer is
commissioning something truly custom, something specially made by
you for her alone, such as fine art, cabinetry, or a gourmet meal. In fact,
for some truly custom items, providing something too quickly can be
equated by customers with low quality or prefab work. The trick here
12 Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
is the same: Learn your own customers’ definition of ‘‘on time,’’ and
obey that definition—not your own.
ing these problems will have an outsized impact on your business suc-
cess. That’s why you need an effective problem resolution process.
Effective problem resolution sounds like a modest goal. But so does
reaching base camp—until you find out you’re climbing Denali. A big
reason it’s so tough? Effective cannot be measured by whether you have
restored the situation to the pre-problem status quo. Effective is mea-
sured by whether you have restored customer satisfaction.
This can be challenging, but it’s well worth it. Resolve a service
problem effectively and your customer is more likely to become loyal
than if she’d never run into a problem in the first place. (On this point,
our studies and practical experience are 100 percent conclusive.) Why
is this so? Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see us
fully strut our service. Of course, we would never recommend that you
make mistakes on purpose so you can engineer a splendid recovery and
win yourself some client love in the process. But it is a silver lining to
keep in mind when you’re staring down a problem.
The topic of effective problem resolution, especially the handling
of service breakdowns, is so crucial that it will fill all of Chapter Four.
First though, we need to explore a fundamental tool: language. Because
no matter what lengths you go to for your customers, if you don’t use
the right words with them, they’ll never appreciate how good they have
it. Language is crucial to how a customer experiences your business,
which makes it a critical element of your brand. It’s the next stop on
our itinerary.