Tags
Business Services, Customer, Customer experience, Customer Management, Customer service, Kano Model, Loyalty business model, share of wallet
“Knowledge is the process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” – Martin H. Fischer, American Scientist, educator, and author
Focusing on Customer Delight is an admirable goal, identifying the specific issues that have the biggest impact on the customer experience is where the real work begins.
I call them “Key Drivers” of delight and dissatisfaction.
Drivers of delight are outstanding service or product related features that help build customer loyalty. Drivers of dissatisfaction are problems and other shortcomings that damage your relationship with customers.
Finding these drivers is one of the most important steps in the entire business improvement effort. Because once we identify the drivers, we can develop targeted initiatives to increase customer delight and eliminate customer dissatisfaction.
These improvements in turn, boost customer loyalty, decrease attrition, increase share of wallet and generate favorable word of mouth advertising, which helps attract new customers.
A brief introduction to drivers inspired by my refrigerator
Let’s consider the impact of a common household appliance – the refrigerator – on delight and dissatisfaction.
When I take the milk out of the refrigerator, I don’t say, “Wow! That’s cold. Isn’t that great?” And I don’t sing the praises of the manufacturer either, because I expect the milk to be cold. That’s why I bought it in the first place. In other words, the refrigerator isn’t a driver of delight, because its just doing it’s job. And that’s exactly what I expect.
But what happens if the refrigerator goes on the blink? The unexpected failure is going to spoil the milk and make me very unhappy. If I go to the extreme, I will probably never buy anything else that carries that brand again — whether it’s a stove, microwave, vacuum cleaner, or anything else.
From the manufacturer’s standpoint, that’s bad enough. But the situation can get even worse. After all, I will probably tell friends and family members about my unhappy experiences with the refrigerator. And some people I talk to avoid that brand in the future too.
That gives you some idea of the huge impact drivers of dissatisfaction can have on customer loyalty, word of mouth advertising and the bottom line.
Drivers change with the times
Now, let’s turn back the clock, and you’ll see a different side to the refrigerator story. After all, when the electric version of the icebox first hit the market, people were delighted. Even if it didn’t work perfectly all of the time, it was still a driver of delight, because it provided a new exciting, time-saving convenience. As the years passed, however, reliable refrigeration became so commonplace that it lost its ability to delight people.
So what happened? Manufacturers add icemakers, cold water taps and other bells and whistles. And for a while, each of these innovations did cause customer delight. Then they too became commonplace features that met – but did not exceed – customer expectations.
