3 | Customer
Kano Satisfaction Model
A few years ago, I met Noriaki Kano at a hotel restaurant in St. Paul to talk about his famous satisfaction model that helped earn him a Deming Prize and ASQ Medals of Distinction. A retired professor, Kano still spoke about the evolution of his model with intensity and curiosity.
The point of the Kano Satisfaction Model is that organizations need a profound understanding of their customers’ requirements to increase satisfaction and secure loyalty. Not all customer requirements are equal. The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you use customer, market, and product offering information to identify and anticipate key customer requirements and changing expectations and their relative importance to customers’ purchasing or relationship decisions?”According to Kano, “relative importance” can be characterized as basic, performance, and excitement.
Basic services or features do little to improve satisfaction unless they fail, in which case they can cause serious dissatisfaction. We expect the checkout lane in a store to move relatively quickly and without any problems. When it does, we don’t feel more satisfied with the store because that is what we expected. When it doesn’t, we feel frustrated and dissatisfied.
Performance services or features are those that produce customer satisfaction. If the store you are visiting is Wal-Mart and you get excited about paying the lowest prices, the signage showing great deals is a differentiable service. If you are shopping at Target, the wide and welcoming aisles and the quality of the merchandise may be differentiable services. Wal-Mart, Target, and other stores must be clear about…
30Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Customer Satisfaction Is Irrelevant
“Has there ever before been an industry that’s so actively tried to piss off their entire customer base?”
Guess which industry Kevin Drum was talking about in his column?
No, it’s not credit card companies since they probably have a few wealthy customers who aren’t getting gouged by 29% interest rates.
The answer is: the airline industry.
Drum does an excellent job of summarizing how the airlines have behaved:
- First, they hassled customers about carry-on bags and convinced them to check their luggage instead.
- Next, they started charging for checked bags.
- As a result, customers stopped checking their bags and started fighting for space in overhead bins.
- American Airlines saw a new opportunity, not to improve customer service and alleviate the bin shortage on planes, but to make a few bucks by charging for “select” coach seats that gives those passengers willing to pay for it dibs on the bin space.
Same crappy seats. Same lack of any amenities. Just peace of mind that your bag will travel with you.
It won’t be long before other airlines follow American’s lead, and it won’t be long after that before airlines start charging for every bag whether you check it or not. And we’ll pay it because we don’t have a choice if we want to fly.
There’s a reason no airline has won the Baldrige Award: Their behavior contradicts one of the Baldrige core values called “customer-driven excellence.”
To read more about customer-driven excellence, click on these articles:
- Creating a Unique Customer Experience
- System Failure
- Do You Trust Your Customers?
- Be Careful How You Measure Customer Satisfaction
- Walk…
The Post-Industrial Marketplace
If your organization is interested in serving the post-industrial marketplace (if it’s not, you’re in trouble), Seth Godin is as good a guide as you’re going to find. Not only does he know what’s going on, he understands the impact of rapid technological change on business. As he writes, “the world is being remade again and again, and the agents of change are the winners.”
The quote comes from “A post-industrial A to Z digital battledore,” which lists his 26 favorite neologisms (even though most are not newly-invented words). Several thought-provoking definitions relate to meeting customer requirements including:
- C is for Choice: “Digital commerce enables niches” because “given the choice, people will take the choice.”
- F is for the Free Prize: “People often don’t buy the obvious or measured solution to their problem, they buy the extra, the bonus, the feeling and the story.”
- I is for Ideavirus: “Ideas that spread win, and you can architect and arrange and manipulate your ideas to make them more likely to spread.”
- K is for kindle: Not the ebook reader. “The internet responds better to bonfires that are kindled over time, to ideas that spread because the idea itself is the engine, not the hype or the promotion.”
- O is for the Orangutan: “The primate is the best way to think about how people interact with websites. They’re like monkeys in a psychology experiment, looking for the banana. If your website offers a banana, people are going to click on it.”
- R is for remarkable: “In a world without effective, scalable advertising,…
Creating a Unique Customer Experience
Like me, you will probably never travel to Bogota, Columbia, but that doesn’t make Andres Carne de Res any less interesting. It’s a restaurant—two actually, one in Bogota and one a half-hour outside of Bogota—that offers such a unique experience that it’s full all the time without promoting itself. You can get a sense of its uniqueness by checking out its Web site here. It’s in Spanish but you don’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy it.
Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the restaurant on Fast Company’s Web site. He teaches a service innovation class using an 8-P framework that helps companies find the disruptive innovations that will differentiate it from the competition. Andres Carne de Res is a case study in disruptive innovation:
1. Product. Check out the restaurant’s amazing menus on its Web site. It pastes yellow butterflies to its local beer bottles and serves wine in hand-painted bottles. While the products may be different from those of its competitors, they certainly are packaged and presented in unique ways.
2. Price. Krippendorff got a menu that was a metal case about the size of shirt box that had a scroll inside and you turned a handle to roll it up or down to see menu items and prices.
3. Place. Andres Carne de Res is only open from Thursday to Sunday but it’s packed every night.
4. Promotion. The restaurant doesn’t do any. Word-of-mouth is enough.
5. Position. Call it “unique.” Andres Carne de Res has three dance floors, a stage, a piano, a DJ,…
19Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSystem Failure
I’ve been travelling for a couple days, which was one day longer than it was supposed to be, so I missed a couple of posts but I did get to experience an appalling inability to meet basic customer requirements that sounds like an ongoing system failure.
I’m talking about Delta Airlines. I was scheduled to fly back from Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night at 7:30. I heard an announcement that a flight from Atlanta to Lexington had been delayed so I checked with the Delta rep at the gate to see if that was my airplane. It wasn’t. I joked about how lucky I was to get a plane coming from Detroit. She said the flights from Atlanta and Detroit seemed to alternate having trouble.
As take-off time approached, we were told that the plane’s engine wouldn’t start and a mechanic had been called. Twenty minutes later he showed up. About 45 minutes later we were told the plane was ready to go and we trudged out to the last plane leaving Lexington that night.
Once everyone was settled and the door closed, we waited and waited and waited for the engines to start and cheered when they finally kicked in. We taxied for take-off and then we taxied some more. Lexington is a small airport so if you taxi for ten minutes, you know something is wrong and, sure enough, we found ourselves back at the gate. The pilot told us the crew had reached its time limit and couldn’t continue. Did…
30Jun2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedFast Food Customer Focus
When Pal’s Sudden Service, a small fast-food chain in Tennessee, won the Baldrige Award in 2001, its president, Thom Crosby, suddenly realized that winning prohibited them from reapplying for five years. “I called up the head of the program and asked if we could decline the award and stay in the system. He didn’t want to hear that.”
Pal’s continues to conduct annual internal assessments because, as Crosby states, “I’m a real big believer.” Like other world-class companies, Pal’s benefits from asking and answering key questions that reveal how the organization works. The snapshot produced by this exercise becomes the engine for change, improvement, and success.
The questions explore all areas that are critical to an effective management system. Many of the questions have never been asked, which means many of the areas they address have never been evaluated. And therein lays their power.
A few years ago I asked these questions of senior leaders at an organization that dominated market share in its industry. One question in particular solicited a variety of responses. The question was: How do you determine key customer requirements and expectations?
Many of the leaders talked about how they interacted with their customers daily. Others mentioned customer surveys, complaints, and lost customer interviews, among other approaches. Nobody described a process. I asked how they used the information from these sources to determine customer requirements and they said they knew what their customers required because they talked to them every day. In other words, they had no process for determining…
16Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedStakeholder Mapping
Ford uses a process called stakeholder mapping to create a physical display of the groups involved in a public dialogue about the company. The stakeholder map fits on a computer screen or a wall board and shows who influences, or should influence, the company and what issues most concern them.
In “The Art of Corporate Listening” (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 11, 2010), Peter Firestein writes about how a good stakeholder map displays not only the issues that concern each stakeholder group, but it clusters the groups by shared interests. In Baldrige language, this would be stakeholder requirements instead of issues and the list of groups would likely be different. Firestein mentions investors, NGOs, communities, regulators, and news reporters. It seems to me that customers and employees are major key influencers that certainly participate in the public dialogue about a company.
I think Firestein is exactly right when he states that the “most powerful part of stakeholder map-building is the culture change it brings to the management team. They must commit to becoming the source of the map’s content, and the only way they can fulfill that commitment is by engaging actively with the company’s stakeholders. Such engagement sensitizes them to external attitudes about the company.”
In the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria, one area to address asks about this specific issue:
- What are your key stakeholder groups?
- What are their key requirements and expectations of your products, customer support services, and operations?
- What are the differences in these requirements and expectations among stakeholder groups?
It sounds like a…
17May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
