With the economic downturn that followed the 2009 banking crisis, the focus has shifted to cost reduction, profitability, and growth. Your customer base provides the best source of new and repeat business at the lowest cost of sale imaginable. However, as we all know, only satisfied customers use our services again or recommend us to other potential customers. So is customer satisfaction a science or an art?

Customer satisfaction is definitely a science and quite separate from soft skills like “People Skills”. Most of the companies or businesses try to establish processes, customer letters, customer service departments, etc. to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. In my opinion, when a customer contacts you or starts your customer support processes, you have already lost the game. The goal of 100% customer satisfaction begins before the consumption of the service or product.

The cynics among you might be thinking ‘Come on, you can’t keep everyone satisfied all the time’. If you’re thinking this, are you suggesting that we should only aim to satisfy a percentage of our customers? It can be 50% or 60%, or some other arbitrary percentage that means the remaining % will be ‘Dissatisfied Customers’. Does this mean your business is really planning for ‘Customer Dissatisfaction’?

The science of customer satisfaction

The science of customer satisfaction is based on a simple equation:

Customer Satisfaction = Supplier Performance – Customer Expectations

This is basic math at work here, although this formula hides two important secrets.

First of all, customer satisfaction is predefined in your service or product, because it is based on customer expectations. Since your business by virtue of its marketing activities, marketing language, routes to market, pricing, etc. send a clear and unequivocal signal to potential customers, it is you who sets the expectations.

Second, you choose your customers by virtue of the fact that you are targeting a specific market segment. If your business does not have a well-defined segment, then you are in serious trouble, especially for not being able to adjust to the expectations of your customers. The best way to annoy everyone is to try to keep everyone happy, so if this is your marketing strategy, you’re in deep trouble. So since you are targeting or should be targeting a specific segment, then you are pre-ordering customer expectations.

So how does this formula help us?

Mathematically this could not be simpler. There are 3 possibilities:

1. Customer Satisfaction = Negative Number

You have not met the customer’s expectations, that is, your level of performance exceeded the customer’s expectations. You have set expectations too high or the baseline of customer expectations was already higher than your capabilities. It follows that your delivery was below PAR. This left the customer expecting more than he could deliver.

two. Customer satisfaction = 0

You have met the customer’s expectations, therefore your performance was exactly as the customer expected. You have a satisfied customer.

3. Customer Satisfaction = Positive Number

You have exceeded customer expectations as your performance exceeded their expectations. This means he has a ‘Delighted Customer’, who is probably his best publicity advocate!

The delighted customer is the panacea of ​​customer service, who is more likely to use your service/product again, but more importantly, will pass on the good news to other potential customers. We all accept the conventional wisdom that bad news travels 5x faster, as dissatisfied customers are 5x more likely to tell others about their bad experience. Have you ever thought how fast “great” news travels? Delighted customers are more likely to recommend you than satisfied ones. It is unknown how much more since no one has done a study on it.

How to set customer expectations?

In essence, what this illustrates is that in order to achieve customer satisfaction, you must be actively involved in setting their expectations. More importantly, you need to set your expectations at levels you can meet, or if you’re really sneaky, just below the level you can meet!

Remember that consumer expectations are influenced by the price and the marketing that surrounds our product or service. I’m not just talking about advertising here; I am referring to the truly holistic view of marketing (Price, Place, Product, Promotion, etc.). Your marketing is your contract with your customers, as you promise, both explicitly and implicitly, certain features about your product. To set the expectation at the right level, you need to be honest, clear, concise, and able to deliver on what you promise. So don’t promise that your resort enjoys wall-to-wall sunshine all year long, when you know full well you’ll have incredible storms in January! Everyone knows that you are not in charge of the climate, but you are in charge of the promises you make. Don’t present your ship as ‘unsinkable’ and then put the fine print ‘as long as it doesn’t hit an iceberg’ (remember the Titanic?!).

The 5 golden rules

1. honesty is not optional – How many vacations have you heard of that being sold as the ‘Oasis of Peace and Tranquility’ only to find out that you are next to the main highway? The cars sold to you as the icon of reliability, when they almost made it out of the dealer’s yard before they needed a visit to the shop. Now, I’m not saying you should advertise the fact that your hotel is off the M25/M4 junction just below the Heathrow flight path. What I’m saying is don’t sell it as the place to have a quiet romantic getaway! If you don’t have it, don’t sell it. Resist the manipulative tendencies of your marketing departments. You can’t fool all the people all the time.

two. Hit or miss the mark – Must target a specific segment or segments. If you do your homework well, you need to know what they expect and whether you can meet the expectations. Remember the Heathrow hotel above? Being a spittle away from Heathrow is a virtue if your client has to catch a flight at an ungodly hour the next morning. So play to your strengths and focus on customer needs. You can’t be everything to every man (or woman), so you can’t meet every expectation.

3. Price – ‘You pay your money and you choose’, goes the old adage. Price is an incredibly important signal. The Ryanair Marketing School argues that no matter what humiliations you put your customers through; They’ll keep using you as long as you’re cheap enough! Despite all the whining, moaning and bad publicity about their service, Ryanair is a thriving business. More and more passengers are using them and despite the lack of customer support, passengers continue to use them. Why? Because is cheap! Very cheap. I mean incredibly, impossibly cheap! This isn’t to say that you can get away with being cheap enough (well, almost), but it does illustrate the role price plays in setting expectations.

4. Don’t promise too much – Now let’s take Ryanair again (should we?). They do what they say, for example, ‘they take you from A to B’. They don’t have smiley face ads, quiet check-in counters, executive lounge, beautiful hostesses fanning you while you sleep, treating you to gourmet meals, etc. They are not intended to be anything other than an aluminum tube packed with as many seats as possible, so that you get to your destination as cheaply as possible. Their expectations are so unbelievably low that just reaching their destination is considered an almost miraculous achievement. So Ryanair is living proof that you should only promise what you can or are willing to deliver. This is your contract with the consumer.

5. Manage your own expectations – Entrepreneurs who own their own business have been accused of having dreamy and unrealistic visions of the operational capabilities of their businesses. This is quite unfair since delusions of grandeur do not only affect entrepreneurs. I will illustrate this by sharing a factual story with you. To protect the innocent (and of course to keep us from getting sued!), I won’t name the company, but they know who they are! Many years ago, my team was awarded a major contract to supply call centers to one of the UK’s leading banks (you know, the ones everyone hates!). This was a massive multi-million pound contract, which generated significant savings for the bank by centralizing its call handling regionally. There was a huge uproar among his customers due to call wait times. Customers had no choice but to call call centers as branch numbers were rerouted to regional call centers. Their president appeared on the morning TV show to explain the benefits and rationale (good PR), that it wasn’t just about saving costs, but actually providing a more efficient service if only he could communicate. Under pressure from the TV interviewer, he made a hasty promise that he would make sure calls were answered within 3 rings (media training required here). After nearly choking on my morning coffee, I had to call his IT Manager and ask if he had seen his boss on TV. The answer was a long groan ‘Oh yes!’ I suggested that perhaps we should schedule a meeting with the president, so that we could explain the exact size of the military that they needed to employ to accomplish such a feat, which in turn would wipe out all of the cost savings that they had made to date. plus additional costs on top. We were able to reduce waiting time and keep your customers happy, without having to employ a workforce the size of the Chinese Red Army. So before you make rash promises, make sure they can be delivered and make sure everyone from the top down in the company understands the limits of your operational capabilities.

If you’re obsessed with customer satisfaction (you should be), contact us to see what we can do for your business. If you need media training, please reach out to someone else!