All Posts Tagged With: "customer satisfaction"
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…
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…
23Aug2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe 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…
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…
30Jun2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedSmall Wonder
Stoner expects every one of its employees to be a leader. Before starting their jobs, new employees complete two weeks of orientation that includes shadowing every job in the company—including that of the president. They can do all that in two weeks because Stoner only has 45 employees.
Located in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, Stoner makes specialized cleaners, lubricants, and coatings, primarily for car care. In 2003, it became the smallest company to win the Baldrige Award.
“We first learned about Baldrige in 1991 through the local Lancaster County program,” said Rob Ecklin, Jr., Stoner’s president. “We started to familiarize ourselves with the criteria then.” Stoner became the first company in the county to win the award in 1995. A few years later it submitted its first Baldrige application.
“We like to learn, to challenge ourselves and to be challenged,” said Ecklin. “Only a small percentage of companies truly want to improve. We’re one of them. We get excited about performance excellence. This is not a sexy business. It’s not high tech. Not flashy. But we’ve been able to get extraordinary results from ordinary people.”
Stoner gets these results by expecting every employee to be a leader. It involves all employees in setting the direction for…
24Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | 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,…
16Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedRecommendability Boosts Revenues
Net promoter score (NPS) is a measure of customer loyalty that many companies are using instead of customer satisfaction surveys. You determine your NPS by asking customers a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Customers use a 0 to 10 rating scale, and their responses are categorized as Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating).
You determine your NPS by subtracting the percent of Detractors from the percent of Promoters. Scores of 75% or higher are considered very good.
Church of the Customer Blog recently reported on the 2010 NPS Industry Benchmark reports released by Satmetrix. The NPS leaders by industry are:
- Airlines: Jet Blue (64%)
- Auto Insurance: USAA (78%)
- Banking: USAA (81%)
- Brokerage & Investments: Charles Schwab (46%)
- Cable & Satellite TV: DIRECTV (27%)
- Cellular Phone Service: Verizon (41%)
- Computer Hardware: Apple (78%)
- Consumer Software: Adobe Systems (37%)
- Credit Cards: American Express (27%)
- Department, Wholesale & Specialty Stores: Costco (66%)
- Grocery & Supermarkets: Trader Joe’s (69%)
- Health Insurance: BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois (5%)
- Homeowners Insurance: USAA (69%)
- Internet Service: Road Runner/Time Warner (21%)
- Life Insurance: State Farm (34%)
- Online Search & Information: Facebook (65%)
- Online Shopping: Amazon.com (71%)
A few things jump out of this list. First, health insurance companies stink. If 5% is the best…
14Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
