All Posts Tagged With: "customer dissatisfaction"
System 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 | ContinuedAn Online Gold Mine
I was halfway into “Lost” when an alarm blared in my hotel room. A recorded voice told me to exit the hotel using the stairs. I did what most people probably do, which was check the hallway and look out the window. I didn’t see or smell a fire. I started putting my shoes on when a different voice announced that we should stay where we were while they assessed the threat. I watched “Lost.” A few minutes later, the first voice once again demanded that we leave the building. I was on the 17th floor and was in no hurry to comply, but I finished getting my shoes on, grabbed my wallet, phone, and briefcase, and headed for the stairs. I never got there: The second voice explained that it was a false alarm and we could return to our rooms.
A month later I stayed in the same hotel. Same thing happened, although they were more efficient this time: They told us to ignore the alarm before I could get my shoes on.
The next morning, the hotel forgot my wake-up call.
When they sent an email asking me to take a short survey, I did, explaining why the false alarms and missed call accounted for the low scores and the likelihood that I wouldn’t stay there again.
A week later I received an email from one of the hotel’s managers apologizing for the alarms and missed call and promising changes to keep both from happening. He offered a coupon for a night’s…
30Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLessons Learned from Dell Hell
In the mid-1990s, I helped a Dell facility apply for the Texas Quality Award. It had world-class manufacturing processes that allowed it to build desktop computers from specs on paper to a customized computer ready for shipment in four hours. They called it “moving at Dell speed.” Asked how it measured performance, everyone pointed to Dell’s stock price, which was climbing so fast the company did 2-for-1 stock splits six times from 1995 to 1999.
It strengths obscured its weaknesses, one of which was the lack of systematic approaches to engaging customers who were not corporate buyers. Dell assumed that the orders it received every day told it all it needed to know about its customers. It took orders. It didn’t listen. And that had to change.
In the introduction to Mark Benioff’s book, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry, Michael Dell, founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell, describes IdeaStorm, an online community forum the company uses to get ideas from its customers. As of today, customers have contributed more than 13,000 ideas through IdeaStorm, which were promoted by other customers nearly 710,000 times, with more than 88,000 comments. Dell has implemented 390 of its customers’ ideas.
In truth, IdeaStorm is a response to “Dell Hell,” a post written by blogger Jeff Jarvis in 2005 that became a lightning rod for customer complaints about Dell’s service. Jarvis had bought a Dell laptop that didn’t work and he couldn’t get anyone at…
29Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Your Customers
In the Baldrige Criteria, “customer” is broadly defined as “actual and potential users of your organization’s products, programs, or services.” No matter what your organization does, it has customers: consumers, purchasers, patients, physicians, students, parents, constituents, etc.
In previous articles we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about leadership, strategic planning, and key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your customer focus, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- What are your key customer groups or market segments and what does each group/segment require of your organization?
- How do you determine which groups/segments to serve?
- How do you determine the requirements of each group/segment?
- How do you identify and innovate products, programs, and/or services to meet these requirements and exceed expectations?
- How do you support your products, programs, and/or services and enable your customers to seek information and utilize them?
- How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer experience and contributes to customer engagement?
- How do you build and manage relationships with your customers?
- How do you listen to your customers to get feedback on your products, programs, services, and support, including managing complaints and determining customer dissatisfaction?
- How do you determine customer satisfaction and engagement, including satisfaction…
Creating a Positive Customer Experience
Few companies face the levels of customer dissatisfaction that Comcast confronts every day. Web sites have been created solely to document the horror stories of aggrieved customers. In June, Comcast ranked second in MSN Money’s Customer Service Hall of Shame, and it ranks second to last among cable and satellite TV companies on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
After years of poor performance and faced with growing competition, Comcast decided to take customer satisfaction seriously. It started by monitoring blogs and Twitter to find and assist unhappy customers. Next, as a StarTribune article documents, it developed a new Customer Care program that features:
- Giving Comcast technicians handheld devices that can test a home’s entire network
- Expanding technicians’ hours to include working on Sundays
- Giving employees “Make It Right” cards to a hand out to anyone with a complaint; the cards have a phone number to call for priority assistance
- Training technicians and call-center agents to listen and be respectful and to help solve problems the first time
- Promoting a new customer guarantee that promises to handle problems quickly, respect the customer’s time, and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on all services
Listening to the Voice of the Customer is the first step to improving satisfaction and building loyalty. The first Area to Address in Item 3.2 of the Baldrige Criteria focuses solely on customer listening, while Item 3.1 asks how you determine and deploy customer support requirements and how you exceed customer expectations throughout the customer life cycle.
The goal is captured by a question in Item 3.1: “How…
26Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedColleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders
Colleges have a stake in the quality of education delivered by K-12 school districts. The Baldrige Criteria ask (3.2a1) how school districts listen to, among others, colleges “to obtain actionable information and to obtain feedback on your educational programs…”
Well, listen to this: Less than one-fourth of the class of 2009 who took the ACT test met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. Two-thirds met the benchmarks in English, slightly more than half in reading, 42% in math, and just 28% in science. And these are supposedly our smartest students.
In an online article on Education Week, Jon L. Erickson, the nonprofit ACT Inc.’s VP for educational services, listed the factors that contributed to the scores:
- Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills and the key standards to be mastered
- High school students are not taking the right courses
- The courses are not rigorous enough to deliver college-level skill and knowledge
Of course, colleges are not a school district’s only stakeholders. A school district must balance the need to better prepare students for college with the needs of other stakeholders including students, parents, businesses, communities, and the government, and those needs don’t align as often you would think.
But they surely align on this: Schools exist to educate students and this is a pretty reliable indicator that they must improve. And in that regard, colleges are not their only dissatisfied stakeholders.
19Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
