It seems that every time I pony up for another insurance bill, I get one of those customer satisfaction surveys emailed within 24 hours, asking a few inane questions about my ‘experience’ and the level of service I received.
There is no room to say it was at best nondescript, often crap, that insurance is a cost I resent, am suspicious of, and just hope that I never have to find out (again) if the after the disaster facts are actually as the advertising blurb promises.
Customer satisfaction indeed.
Normally I just ignore them, as responding only seems to encourage. (a bit like voting)
However, a recent emailed questionnaire got me thinking about what customer satisfaction really is, and how we go about creating and retaining such an ephemeral and personal idea.
Is it enough that we ‘satisfy’ our customers, and if so, what does that actually mean?
‘Delight our customers’ is a phrase that seems to have made it onto a few mission statements over the recent past. Is that one better than ‘satisfy’ or just more hyperbole?
Jeff Bezos famously demands that there be an empty chair in every meeting, a reminder that everything Amazon does is aimed at customer satisfaction. Reed Hastings has built Netflix from a minor irritation to Blockbuster into a digital entertainment behemoth by being ‘customer obsessed.’
If we are to be truly customer focussed, what should all the common clichés really mean?
‘We listen to what our customers tell us’
Really? I listen to what my aging mother tells me, but do I follow the advice? Rarely these days. It should mean that we understand not just the words, but the intent, and we use the information to test, and retest the delivery of our value proposition.
‘We obsess about customer satisfaction’
Most obsessions I have seen are all about the obsessor, rather than the obsessee. (are they really words?). It makes some feel better to tell ourselves we are obsessed with customer satisfaction, it justifies those long workshop sessions in a nice location. Most times when I go out and ask customers what they think of the level of service they receive, it falls short of satisfactory, let alone obsessional, and is markedly lower than the score businesses give themselves when asked the same question. It is easy to pass this off as delusional, but the reality is that customers rarely think about service until they experience it, and then only when it fails them. By contrast, companies are genuinely thinking about service consistently because it is important to them, but in an abstract way.
‘We understand what the customer expects of us’.
That is great, but also a bit unusual, as different customers almost always are looking for different things. In B2B businesses, it is essential that you understand the detail of a customer, and potential customers business processes so that you can really tailor your offering. A bit harder in B2C, but it is still true that individuals are seeking a range of different things that add up to ‘satisfaction’ in their minds. The real task is to create a situation where the customer sticks with you through thick and thin, simply because they believe you are better than any alternative.
‘We put customers in front of profits’
This gets trotted out regularly, without any understanding of the implications. The reason we have customers is ultimately, to make profits, and without profits, there will be no customer service at all. There has to be a balance, but it is true that satisfied customers lead to higher profits, it is a hard balance to get right.
‘The customer is always right’
The old perennial, and it has always been nonsense. However, treating customers with respect, humility and giving them the opportunity to be right is a great strategy. The most common example used is the retail chain Nordstroms in the US. As the story goes, take a car tyre into Nordstroms and demand your money back because it was not up to expectations, and they will give it to you, despite not selling tyres. Perhaps it should be ‘The right customer is always right,’ to reflect the reality that there are some customers who are more trouble than they are worth, and you hope they go to your opposition.
‘The quality of our products speaks for itself’
No it does not! You need to speak for it. The base expectation of any customer is that the product you provide will deliver the outcome you promise. That is quality. A Hyundai will get you reliably from point A to Point B, does that mean it is the same quality as a Bentley, which will also get you reliably from A to B?. The answer to that question will most often be ‘No’ but then defining the ‘Value’ delivered by the extra few hundred grand to buy the Bentley becomes a different conversation entirely, with different customers.
Creating great experiences for customers brings them back for more, delivering revenue at much a reduced cost than if you had to find a new customer. Share of Wallet and Lifetime Customer Value are the most undervalued measures of sales effectiveness, and also the most effective.
