What drives a customer’s decision
to patronize a brand is the confidence in that brand. The brand in turn needs to be
adept at meeting the fundamental expectations of your customer before striving
to provide extraordinary loyalty - building customer service . This will
give the customer satisfaction, creating a good experience and the beginning of
the journey towards a loyal relationship.
Every customer’s confidence in
companies can be fragile; one mistake and customers, without hesitation, are ready
to patronize another business after broadcasting his/ her displeasure on social
media to his/ her network of friends/ followers. Often problems occur because
companies don’t deliver on what their brand promises state they will do. In
other words, they fail to keep their promises.
Promises made by companies are
different but centre on the same basic expectations which define the customer’s
experience and ultimately, the customer’s relationship with your brand:
·
Product Quality: Are your products in good condition, in date?
· Delivery
time of product or services: Was delivery in 2 days as informed or 5 days with
no communication on late delivery?
Customer
Support: Is your support team prompt in response and solution focused? Defensive
on service failure? Interactive Voice Response (IVR) only with no reachable
human agent for more difficult, uncommon problems?
·
Service:
Service Gaps / failure with no recovery system on place
·
Problem
Resolution: Service failure with no empowered support staff or manager
available to resolve the problem?
The list of basic needs is endless
as applicable to different organizations. How does your organization perform in
meeting basic expectations of customers? While brand promise is to deliver
world class customer service, the customers can be blown away with the delivery
of the basic brand promise. A customer whose basic expectation has not being
met will not understand nor appreciate the delivery of what they had not
expected from your brand and will not be impressed. A typical example was that of
Nimi who had made a hotel reservation 2 days prior to her trip, called to
confirm arrival at the hotel 2 hours before her arrival, arrived at the hotel
tired but ready to change and attend a meeting in another hotel for
2.30pm. She arrived at her selected hotel
at noon with a mental plan of 1 hour for settling in, 30 minutes for interview
preparations and personal grooming before heading out for her executive
management interview which was to be conducted in a facility 30 minutes’ drive
from her hotel. This would have given her 30 minute head at her appointment.
Instead, she got to the hotel to be informed that her room was being cleaned ‘specially’
for her. She got into her room at 1.30pm, unpacked and had a quick change.
Departed the hotel at 1.50pm, got to the interview location by 2.28pm – with a
little traffic – and barely had time to catch her breath before the interview
commenced. Due this, she was not able to review her notes and mentally prepare
at the last minute, a habit that she had fed off professionally for years. She
was unimpressed with her performance at the interview because of the chain of
events prior to the interview.
Upon her return to the hotel, she
complained bitterly to the shift manager who apologized profusely and gave her
a complimentary meal for the night and further offered 20 % discount on the
room rate upon her next visit to which she declined politely. She got back home
and wrote a factual review on the hotel, giving them a 1 star rating and
dissuading any of her friends from using that hotel. She did not get the basic
service and did not value their service recovery.
Her basic expectation was not met,
irrespective of the steps she took to eliminate any failure on the hotel’s part
and it still happened. Basic expectations were not met. Customers will however,
have different expectations of different brands but the basic expectations
remain the same and promise of delivery is expected to me met.
Basic
Elements of Customer Satisfaction
Micah Solomon and Leonardo
Inghilleri articulate these basic elements in the best seller book ‘Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit;
The Secret Of Building A Five Star Service Organization’ as:
· *Perfect Product
· *Caring Delivery
· *Timeliness
· *An Effective Problem Resolution Process
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. In the hotel scenario, the
hotel was recommended by a friend to Nimi with the information it was a good
hotel with good services including good internet speed, clean, large rooms,
security, a gym, pool, restaurant, bar services and friendly, efficient staff.
How efficient were the staff?
Caring
Delivery
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. Nimi arrived at the hotel at 12pm and
walked to the reception. The security at the entrance did not say a word to
her. She gave her reservation details to the check in staff who grunted a
greeting and proceeded to check her into her room. She looked clueless for a
few minutes before beckoning to a supervisor who then looked at the system
before apologising to Nimi that there were no free rooms at that moment. She
immediately requested to speak with the manager who came in after 5 minutes to
explain that her room was available but needed ‘extra cleaning’. And it all went
downhill from there. She was unimpressed by their inefficiency in resolving the
problem speedily as well as the attitude in which the situation was handled as
there was no empathy nor apologies until she returned from her interview to
demand an explanation from the manager. At that point, he couldn’t provide a
logical explanation but to wish it away, offered some compensations which were
of no value to Nimi.
Timeliness
Customers now determine appropriate timelines in
product/ service delivery.
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’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-in customers is obsolete for most brick-and-mortar
merchants. If you don’t have it in stock when a customer walks in, a customer’s
just going to go online and find it for herself.
An
Effective Problem - Resolution Process
Service breakdowns and other problems experienced
by customers are crucial emotional moments in a business relationship.
Therefore, solving these problems will have an out-sized impact on your business
success. That’s why you need an effective problem resolution process. Effective
problem resolution sounds like a modest goal. Effective cannot be measured
by whether you have restored the situation to the pre-problem status quo. Effective is measured by whether you have restored customer satisfaction. This can
be challenging, but well worth it. Resolve a service problem effectively and your customer is more likely to become loyal than if she’d never run into
a problem in the first place.
Why is this so? Because until a problem occurs, the customer
doesn’t get to see us fully strut our service. Of course, we would never recommend that you make
mistakes on purpose so you can engineer a splendid recovery and win yourself
some client love in the process. But it is a silver lining to keep in mind when
you’re staring down a problem. The topic of effective problem resolution,
especially the handling of service breakdowns is crucial and will be expatiated
on in future articles.
With effective problem resolution comes the usage
of a fundamental tool: language, choice of words. Irrespective of the lengths you go to for
your customers, if you don’t use the right words with them, they’ll never
appreciate how good they have it. Language is crucial to how a customer experiences
your business, which makes it a critical element of your brand.
Why was Nimi not an advocate for the hotel brand even though she got the
job and was given compensation? Two
factors:
1.
Inefficiency at
resolving the problem. They had a double room which they could have upgraded
her to but chose not to because they needed the General Manager’s permission
and no one was empowered to make that decision or willing to call the General Manager
for authorization, irrespective of the room being unoccupied. This info was
provided by the shift manager.
2.
Lack of empathy by
the staff.
Conclusively, if you were wondering, Nimi got the
job.
Comments
Post a Comment