Chuck Terry
Executive Vice President & Chief Sales Officer
Carew International, Inc.
Attaining high marks in customer satisfaction is a universal goal in the business community. There are dozens of business books at your local bookstore and probably hundreds more in print extolling the virtues of keeping your customers delighted with your products and services. In a recent blog titled The New Human Nature of Sales, I referred to the fact that today’s customer wants exactly what they want, in their own unique way; or to quote Burger King, to “have it their way.” What effort could be more worthwhile than the pursuit of customer satisfaction? So where is the danger?
The danger lurks in continually evaluating customer satisfaction based solely upon what the customer prefers within your individual and current menu of offerings. The deception is exaggerated when companies which put too much emphasis on customer satisfaction scores to evaluate their success. Companies are often misled by high customer satisfaction scores, only to learn too late that they have lost market share to their competitors. How could this be if they are delivering such high customer satisfaction ratings? It is pretty simple…failure to innovate.
What happens when someone approaches one of your satisfied customers and offers them a product or service that can do everything yours can, plus something new and cool the customer didn’t even know was possible? Your “satisfied” customer just had the rating scale of customer satisfaction reset for them by the competitor providing them a capability or feature they would have never thought of on their own. You were giving them exactly what they wanted until they found out they could have all that you offered and more!
In their book, The Experience Economy, Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine describe a phenomenon known as “customer sacrifice” that shows the danger of reliance on customer satisfaction surveys. It is a scenario I know all too well. I travel a LOT; and up until several years ago, my airline of choice carried Pepsi products on their planes. I do a good deal of work with Coca-Cola and am very loyal to their products. Upon boarding the plan, I would consistently ask the flight attendant for a Diet coke; to which she replied, “We don’t have Coke, is Pepsi okay?” I am sure you have heard this exact exchange at your local restaurants hundreds of times. After a while, I began ordering Pepsi, even though what I truly wanted was Coke. The airline’s customer satisfaction report would only have reflected that I ordered a Pepsi, they gave me a Pepsi, and thus, a perfect score was registered in that column. There lies the danger… customer satisfaction surveys capture neither this type of customer compromise nor the “customer didn’t know something more was possible” scenario I referenced earlier.
Take a good look around your business. Is there customer sacrifice occurring? Have customers gotten comfortable ordering what you have instead of what they truly desire? Are your competitors developing or already offering innovations that could reset the bar on customer satisfaction?
The customer satisfaction challenge is always evolving -- just as the bicycle document delivery companies learned when someone offered their clients a fax machine. Now the fax machine has been rendered nearly obsolete by e-mail attachments. Resolve to be the one to reset the bar, rather than the one contentedly reading favorable customer satisfaction reports while another provider resets the bar for you.
Executive Vice President & Chief Sales Officer
Carew International, Inc.
Attaining high marks in customer satisfaction is a universal goal in the business community. There are dozens of business books at your local bookstore and probably hundreds more in print extolling the virtues of keeping your customers delighted with your products and services. In a recent blog titled The New Human Nature of Sales, I referred to the fact that today’s customer wants exactly what they want, in their own unique way; or to quote Burger King, to “have it their way.” What effort could be more worthwhile than the pursuit of customer satisfaction? So where is the danger?
The danger lurks in continually evaluating customer satisfaction based solely upon what the customer prefers within your individual and current menu of offerings. The deception is exaggerated when companies which put too much emphasis on customer satisfaction scores to evaluate their success. Companies are often misled by high customer satisfaction scores, only to learn too late that they have lost market share to their competitors. How could this be if they are delivering such high customer satisfaction ratings? It is pretty simple…failure to innovate.
What happens when someone approaches one of your satisfied customers and offers them a product or service that can do everything yours can, plus something new and cool the customer didn’t even know was possible? Your “satisfied” customer just had the rating scale of customer satisfaction reset for them by the competitor providing them a capability or feature they would have never thought of on their own. You were giving them exactly what they wanted until they found out they could have all that you offered and more!
In their book, The Experience Economy, Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine describe a phenomenon known as “customer sacrifice” that shows the danger of reliance on customer satisfaction surveys. It is a scenario I know all too well. I travel a LOT; and up until several years ago, my airline of choice carried Pepsi products on their planes. I do a good deal of work with Coca-Cola and am very loyal to their products. Upon boarding the plan, I would consistently ask the flight attendant for a Diet coke; to which she replied, “We don’t have Coke, is Pepsi okay?” I am sure you have heard this exact exchange at your local restaurants hundreds of times. After a while, I began ordering Pepsi, even though what I truly wanted was Coke. The airline’s customer satisfaction report would only have reflected that I ordered a Pepsi, they gave me a Pepsi, and thus, a perfect score was registered in that column. There lies the danger… customer satisfaction surveys capture neither this type of customer compromise nor the “customer didn’t know something more was possible” scenario I referenced earlier.
Take a good look around your business. Is there customer sacrifice occurring? Have customers gotten comfortable ordering what you have instead of what they truly desire? Are your competitors developing or already offering innovations that could reset the bar on customer satisfaction?
The customer satisfaction challenge is always evolving -- just as the bicycle document delivery companies learned when someone offered their clients a fax machine. Now the fax machine has been rendered nearly obsolete by e-mail attachments. Resolve to be the one to reset the bar, rather than the one contentedly reading favorable customer satisfaction reports while another provider resets the bar for you.
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