All Posts Tagged With: "customer dissatisfaction"
Seeking Very Satisfied Customers
According to a recent survey by American Express, most Americans are willing to spend an average of 9% more with companies that provide excellent service. The American Express Global Customer Service Barometer survey suggests that not many companies are taking advantage of this opportunity: Nearly half of the respondents said companies are helpful but don’t do anything extra for them, while 21% believe that their business is taken for granted. A little over a third think that companies have increased their focus on providing quality service in the current economy, which is higher than I would have expected considering all of the layoffs and the added pressure that puts on the people who remain.
One of the adages about customer service is that people are much more likely to talk about a bad experience than a good one. The survey contradicts that notion, finding that consumers will talk about a good experience 75% of the time but complain about a bad one 59% of the time. If that’s the case, companies should be investing more in delighting their customers rather than just avoiding a bad experience.
When it comes to your online image, the survey found that consumers put more stock in negative reviews on blogs and social networking sites (57%) than in positive ones (48%), but the percentages are close enough that positive and negative reviews are both important.
The Baldrige Criteria ask several questions about how you build customer relationships including how “you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive…
28Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKano 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…
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…
