My last business trip resulted in no less than four feedback opportunities: the airline, the hotel, the rental car company and the travel agency. Each of these organizations sought my feedback to help improve my customer experience. Marvelous!
It seems every time I buy a product or service, the provider offers the opportunity to give them some feedback through a customer survey. Although the feedback opportunities are wonderful, my service providers are mired in the details of asking about the logistics of their service. Executing flawlessly merely provides them feedback that they delivered what I expected. This is useful information, yet often empty. In fact, we call these feedback surveys “happy charts,” meaning that an extremely high percentage, as high as 90%, of customers, are “happy” with the experience they just had unless a significant service failure occurred or an expectation went unmet.
In the early stages of truly understanding what drives loyalty and advocacy, many of my clients focus on the details of executing a process without failure. Basic service/product quality is really the metric being captured. Yet meeting basic quality expectations isn’t enough today to enchant customers.
Voice of the Customer programs fall behind by focusing primarily on the quality of an experience. Knowing if a customer was greeted properly, if reservations were in order, and if the rental car had fuel are measures of basic service quality, core expectations of value for money. Today’s leaders take the next step and tease out what drives customers to extol the virtues of the experience.
Last year a colleague stayed at a hotel that was very close to the airport and provided a pickup service. He arrived and contacted the hotel for pickup, but they never arrived. Being tired and hungry, he jumped in a taxi. While he was checking into the hotel, the desk clerk asked if he was the gentleman that had requested pick-up. Finding out that he was, the clerk reimbursed his taxi fare. Wow! More than six months later, he still talks about how delighted he was with the hotel and recommends it constantly.
Does your organization know what customers love about you?
The whole love thing sounds a little squishy doesn’t it? That’s the challenge. Gaining the emotional connection with customers is truly the goal of any business. Emotional connection drives loyalty and advocacy. The Walt Disney Company knows what guests love about their experience; Apple knows what users love about their products. Do you?
The next time you review customer feedback results, see if you have the answer to these questions:
- What did your customers love about their experience with you today?
- Is there anything that they’ll tell their friends not to miss about their experience with you?
- If customers could change one single thing about their experience, what would that be?
Look beyond the basic quality of the process to discover the heart of the experience. This will help you build an experience that truly enchants your customers.
Since you used the words “trapped by customer satisfaction” in the title of your blog, I think it would have been helpful to describe the trap in detail and then discuss one or more ways out of the trap.