Services
Twelve years ago this year, I hung up my customer satisfaction boots and set out to find out the answer to what actually made a difference for customers. I wanted to see if I could find something which would help businesses make better profits and for those not in the profit sector, operate more efficiently.
To answer this question I asked myself what would it be like to use a new service or buy from a new provider and be absolutely certain that the service was going to be good. For example, if the service ran like the Swiss Railways and people came away feeling like they had just spent an afternoon with their favourite Aunt, what difference would that make? I know most of us like a moan now and again but we could then save those moans for important matters like the weather, because our money and time were being well spent with reliable and excellent suppliers.
So let’s take the Swiss Railways (they are very good) and the afternoon with Auntie, as the benchmark for good service and think about how it would be if that was the norm. Two questions:
• If you knew you always got such a service would you be more inclined to shop around for new suppliers, take a risk on something more innovative or just stick with the “same old”?
• Also, would you look at doing more with the supplier, find different ways of working together, and, if you were in the position to do so, grow what you did for your users and customers, with that supplier?
My research in this area showed me that it was not aiming for customer satisfaction which made the difference but by having satisfaction as an outcome it reveals its value.
Customer satisfaction = opportunity
The best description of why customer satisfaction, as an outcome, matters was given to me by one of our inspirational customers. She said; “Customer satisfaction is important because it gives you an opportunity. If I know from your measures that my clients are not happy, then I need to fix those problems. Once that is done, and only then, will I know I have the opportunity to do more business with them.” She is quite right but we only measure customer satisfaction as an outcome, because we worked out twelve years ago what we need to measure to get to satisfaction, and it is not satisfaction.
What we found was that satisfaction is like a beach ball, the more you push it the further away it goes, however by measuring and targeting benefits delivery, satisfaction becomes a rock on which organisations can rely.
Measure Benefits – because benefits are what people want
For an organisation to know if they have created the equivalent of the Swiss Railways and tea with Auntie, they need to understand the essence of their service, that is the benefits their customers want every time they use the service. So to stick with the example, are they on-time, clean and just the right amount of friendly, that is the railways on-time and clean, and the Auntie friendly? Once that is understood, all that needs to be done is find the best way of measuring those; by all means ask about satisfaction, if it helps, but mainly it is important to focus on and fix any deviation from the core benefits, and from there will appear the opportunity. We call those benefit measures Halo Measures. This is simply because they create the Halo Effect of the organisation. The glow which pulls in customers, the right people for your teams and makes all the messaging and communication work well. It sounds simple and it is. We have been doing it for the past twelve years.