CHAPTER TWO
The Four Elements of Customer Satisfaction
Perfect Product, Caring Delivery, Timeliness, and an Effective Problem Resolution Process
There’s not much point in taking a specialized upper-level course before you’ve studied the field’s introductory concepts. In a similar vein, there are prerequisites to meet before you can learn to provide extraordinary, loyalty-building customer service.
First, become adept at meeting the more fundamental expectations of your customers. That is, learn to make them satisfied.
What does a satisfied customer look like? She thinks your business offers a reasonable solution that it delivers well. If asked, she’ll say nice things about you. But although she may have some warm feelings for your business, she’s not yet an advocate for your brand, and, unlike a truly loyal customer, she can still be wooed away. A merely satisfied customer is still a free agent, exploring the marketplace.
She still has a wandering eye.
Nonetheless, simple customer satisfaction is one of the underpinnings of the exceptional relationship we call true customer loyalty. And, fortunately, customer satisfaction is based on four predictable factors. Customers are satisfied whenever they consistently receive:
1. A perfect product
2. Delivered by a caring, friendly person
3. In a timely fashion … with (because any of those three elements may misfire)
4. The support of an effective problem resolution process
A Perfect Product
Customers want defect-free products and services. You need to design your product or service so that it can be expected to function perfectly within foreseeable boundaries.
Things will sometimes go wrong. Your products, and people, will sometimes fail due to unpredictable circumstances. But sloppy or incomplete product or service design is, from a customer’s perspective, intolerable.
Suppose you’re staffing an online photo lab. Let’s call it Stutterfly. You know from experience that one prepress technician (PPT) is needed for every 100 orders in-house. Now suppose you want to be ready for a maximum of 1,000 photo orders at any given time. How many prepress technicians do you need? Ten? Perhaps. But a “perfectly designed” answer needs to take into account absenteeism, last minute no-shows, and vacation time: any reasonably foreseeable scenario that could prevent you from actually having ten PPTs on hand to cover the orders in-house. In addition, your “perfect design” needs to include provisions for getting these technicians all the supplies, tools, resources, and information they’ll need to do a great job.
Of course, something that is not realistically foreseeable could still happen: six of your ten PPTs might get the flu on the same night, or a major earthquake could knock a paper mill that supplies you out of commission. The product will not always be perfectly deliverable. We know.
But you must design it to be perfect—foreseeing all that is foreseeable.
Delivered by Caring People
Your perfect product now requires caring, friendly people to deliver it. Let’s visualize just how a product and its delivery work together to determine satisfaction. Let’s make the setting Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. Picture featureless corridors, long ticket counters, and the reason you wish you didn’t have to exchange your ticket a few days before Thanksgiving: a maze of people waiting behind a roped line to speak with any of five agents. Eventually, you make it to the front of the maze. Now you’re first in line, waiting politely for an agent at the counter to help you.
What do you hear?
“Next!”
Hmmm. As you approach the agent, you see that her “Next” was premature.
So you stand there, waiting for her to finish the previous transaction.
Finally she finishes keyboarding, looks at you, and says curtly: “Yes?”
You answer, “My plans have changed. Would it be possible to exchange this ticket so I can fly to Washington Dulles?”
“Uh huh …”
She takes your ID, gives you your boarding pass—and never looks up at you.
“Next!”
You take the boarding pass, go through security, get on the plane, and land safely and on time at your destination. So, you got a perfect product: a product that would appear, if anyone charted it out, to be 100 percent free of defects.
But do you feel satisfied?
Of course not.
OK. Now let’s change the script. Same airport, same maze, same line of people ahead of you in the maze. Again, you eventually make it to the front of the line, where you quietly wait for an agent to call on you.
“May I help the next person in line, please?” (You step forward.)
“Good morning, Sir. Thank you for your patience. How are you today?”
“Not bad at all, thanks, considering, and how are you?”
“Just fabulous. How may I assist you today?”
“My plans have changed, and I need to get on a flight to Washington Dulles.”
“It’ll be my pleasure. I hear the weather isn’t actually too bad in the D.C. area this weekend. Are you visiting family for Thanksgiving?”
“No, it’s just business. But I’ll be flying back right afterward and will get home for the holiday.” (She checks your ID and hands you your boarding pass.)
“Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
“No, I think that’s all.”
“Well then, have a splendid day.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Thank you for flying with us.”
How was this interaction? It was great, right? An interaction like this, with just a single caring, friendly employee, can make us feel good about doing business with an entire company.
Now you get through the long security line and to the gate. Only at that point do you notice your boarding pass says Dallas, not Dulles.
Uh … now are you satisfied?
Again, no—not with a defective product or service, no matter how warmly delivered.
In a Timely Fashion
In our world of iPhones and IM, your customers get to decide what is and isn’t an appropriate timeline. A perfect product delivered late by friendly, caring people is the equivalent of a defective one.
Customer experiences guide their expectations, so on-time delivery standards continue to get tougher all the time. What your customer today thinks of as on-time delivery is not only stricter than what her parents would have tolerated, it’s stricter than what even her older sister would have tolerated.
Amazon.com’s tight supply and delivery chain has single-handedly raised the timeliness bar in the online world, but that’s not the end of the story: Their speedy online delivery has raised offline expectations as well. In fact, the concept of special ordering for walk-...