chapter 2

the customer remains the same
everything that isn’t new under the sun

not to go all ecclesiastical on you, but there’s an awful lot that isn’t new under the sun when it comes to customer desires. The basic recipe for what customers want remains the same as ever. Not necessarily in the same proportions as in bygone eras (or even last month) but containing the same ingredients nonetheless.

This reality can be missed in the rush of round-the-clock tweets and RSS feeds. But while there’s much that ever-advancing technology has emphasized, escalated, and intensified in customer demands, when you cut through the digital clutter, what customers require to be satisfied is, at the core, a classic: value. Not necessarily price, but value. (Price, of course, cuts both ways: While it’s true that value can be signaled to a customer by an attractively low price, value can at times be enhanced by a high price implying prestige, safety, or sophistication.) If you want to offer value to your customers, you need to provide the following components.

providing value: as easy as 1, 2 … 4

You provide value when you deliver the four components that reliably create customer satisfaction. This is the framework laid out in Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit; let’s revisit it here in our technologically informed context. Its importance is ever increasing.

1. A perfect product or service

2. Delivered in a caring, friendly manner

3. On time (as defined by the customer)

… with (because any of these three elements may #FAIL)

4. The backing of an effective problem-resolution process

Let’s examine each of these in turn.

a perfect product or service

Perfect? Sounds suspect: We’re told from an early age that nothing and no one is perfect. If you’re from a religious family, you’ve likely heard “Nobody’s perfect except for God.” (And if you’re from a secular family, you may have been told—until not too long ago—something like “Nobody’s perfect except for … Toyota.”)

So let’s clarify how I’m defining “perfect.” I’m talking about a product or service that’s designed and tested to function perfectly under reasonably foreseeable circumstances and within a reasonable product lifetime. Consider my aforementioned Volvo, which has what I estimate to be twenty-eight and a half airbags. I depend on my Volvo to keep me safe, up to a point: If I glancingly hit a street sign or telephone pole at a reasonable rate of speed, I expect to be able to walk away, maybe even drive away, from the accident. On the other hand, if some-one fires a guided missile toward me through the windshield, I don’t expect to be able to walk away, or walk again, period. That’s not reasonably foreseeable, and I don’t expect my Volvo to be designed to protect me from such an event. Nobody (absent the personality disordered) expects you to create products that won’t ever malfunction when facing the worst of all possible worlds. But you can’t design glaring defects into what you sell and still expect to satisfy your customers.

delivered in a caring, friendly manner

Even a perfect product or service won’t take you far if your customer-facing personnel are misaligned psychologically with the customers they are serving. Lack of caring delivery will sink most any perfect product or service.

… It can even sink your next flight—or at least your perception of it. Air travel, more than other aspects of modern life, illustrates the astonishing, disproportionate emphasis people put on caring delivery. Perhaps in no other industry do companies hold the lives of their customers as completely in their hands as do the airlines. Fortunately, the commercial airline industry and its regulators hold us in very, very safe hands: Did you know that, as I write this, there hasn’t been a single commercial air transport fatality in the United States this year or last year?^{1, 2}

That’s an extraordinary achievement. About as close to a “perfect product” as I can imagine. And there was a little article in the paper about it. But the article was dwarfed by the column inches devoted to passenger frustration with customer service issues: surly flight attendants, baggage fees, overcrowding.

And this press coverage pretty accurately mirrors how passengers react. They get bent out of shape over little signs of uncaring: flights canceled with abrupt or insufficient explanation, inflexible gate agents, peanut wrappers in seatbacks. Passengers take safety for granted and perseverate over a lack of caring.

To quote the practical philosopher Alain de Botton, discussing British Airways in his beautifully offbeat study A Week at the Airport,

It was never far from Diane’s [Diane Neville, trainer and supervisor for British Airways] thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees’ bad moods. On reaching home, a passenger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel’s starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was assigned—this retort stemming from a sense on the part of a member of the check-in team (perhaps discouraged by a bad head cold or a disappointing evening at a nightclub) of the humiliating and unjust nature of existence.³

I once heard, in a similar vein, management guru Tom Peters, a beyond-frequent flyer, give a vivid description of this paradox, based on his own experience:

Smoke started pouring into the cabin of the small private-charter aircraft I was on, [forcing] an emergency landing. After an all-night-stay at a Holiday Inn in Buffalo, I went on to Glens Falls in another small plane the next morning.

After my knees stopped shaking, was I angry? Not at all … (1) I’m not only not irritated by the event, but (2) I’m pleased by the pilot’s good work, and (3) I only wonder that such things don’t happen more often.

On the other hand, there is an old memory that still rankles. A few months before the smoke-in-the-cabin emergency, I paid full-fare first class … for an American Airlines flight from Chicago to San Francisco. Yet on this four-hour, late-evening flight the crew couldn’t even find a second bag of peanuts to serve. I was furious. I did a little spot on national TV about it. I wrote the chairman. Today, more than two years later, my “no second bag of peanuts” memory is clear. Translation: I can readily countenance smoke in the cabin, a life-and-death issue. But I can’t countenance what I see as unspeakable neglect—i.e., no extra peanuts after forking over close to $1,000.⁴

Don’t for a second get me wrong: Perfection—you need it. The perfection in question here, safety, is extremely important to me: Remember, I’m the guy who drives a car with some twenty-eight and a half airbags. But in a competitive industry, and that phrase defines all of us, not just airlines, perfection is rarely enough to hang your hat on. The softer science—care and comfort—is what lets you reach and retain a customer.

in a timely fashion

An expectation of timeliness has been a constant and critical requirement of commerce since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In today’s ultra-accelerated world of “Why do I have to wait a full three seconds for a web page to load on my Android phone?” customers are expecting speedier service than ever. No matter how otherwise perfect your product is, in the eyes of the customer it’s broken if you deliver it late.

Worse, on-time delivery is the most movable of moving targets. What seemed speedy last year may seem snail-like today. Companies in today’s marketplace need to come up with solutions that stay in step with customers’ ever more extreme perception of what “in a timely fashion” means. Because if they don’t, their competition will step in to fill the timeliness void. Here are a few examples of this phenomenon:

Marriott’s 5-10-20 menu: This menu, which Marriott has begun rolling out in casual lounges and restaurants around the country, is organized by whether the food takes five, ten, or twenty minutes to prepare, and does away with traditional groupings like appetizer, entrée, and so forth.

This is smart thinking.

Because, really, what so many business travelers, breakfasters running late, and lunch-breakers want to know is: “How long’s it going to take to get my food?” Without the timings printed on the menu, the alternative is to ask the server “What’s fast?” Which too often brings the server’s knee-jerk reaction: “Oh, everything’s pretty quick.”

Which, of course, couldn’t possibly be true. This response just means the server has no idea, or the prep time per menu item has wild variability. And who can afford to miss the boarding call for her plane, watching that “pretty fast” food fail to arrive?

Dude, where’s my e-confirmation? In the digital realm, when you submit a service request to a web site—for example, to cancel or update the information on your hotel reservation—how long should it take to receive a confirmation in your inbox? I’ll tell you my personal answer: If an email receipt doesn’t arrive within about half a minute, I think something has gone wrong. This impatience isn’t something I’m proud of, but it’s true, and it makes sense: Today, what’s been experienced once is now expected.

Diet Coke advertising: When a product has a timeliness advantage, a smart marketing department will step up to exploit it. A campaign of Diet Coke posters plastered near every possible Starbucks location asks, “Who has time to wait in line for a latte?” That’s a slap at the world’s most successful coffee chain, hitting in one of the few areas it may be vulnerable: There’s some place on almost every block to find a Diet Coke, so do you really have time to stand in line to order coffee, and wait again while your drink’s concocted?

… backed up by an effective problem-resolution process

There are three moments in a customer interaction that stick out in a customer’s mind above all others: first impressions, last impressions, and when things fall apart. I call this third category “service breakdowns.” Service breakdowns often, unfortunately, lead to customer, communication, and, ultimately, brand-value breakdowns.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You need to develop an effective problem-resolution process for these inevitable service breakdowns. This process needs to be effective at restoring whatever has broken for your customer and, more important, at restoring the customer to the state of satisfaction that existed before the breakdown took place.

If that sounds like a tall order, you’re right. That’s why you need to build problem resolution into your company structure, your culture, and your day-to-day thinking. It’s more than worth it: Done right, you’ll often bind your customers to you more closely than if the problem had been avoided in the first place.

A well-thought-out problem-resolution process starts by active “harvesting” of complaints. Your company should have the same policy as Don Cor-leone in The Godfather and insist on hearing bad news right away. The sooner you learn about the problems customers perceive with your service or product, the faster you can take corrective action, minimize bad publicity, and turn the situation into one that brings your customer (along with your customer’s online and offline friends) back to your side. Whirlpool does this with its active presence on Facebook (see Chapter 13). Southwest, Delta, and Comcast do it by active monitoring of Twitter—with varying degrees of success, depending on the solidity of the organization behind the tweet. One way I do it at my company is by allowing every email recipient (sixty thousand recipients per company email we send out) to reply directly to me if desired.

Once these customer concerns are received, through whatever channel they come in, your problem-resolution process needs to serve the emotional needs of your customers. This means teaching your staff to apologize and empathize immediately with the customer’s version of the story, sincerely and without hesitation or equivocation, saving the idea of “right and wrong” for another time.

LEGO, for example, knows that every once in a while some of its plastic bricks will fail to make it into one of its kits, or that one of LEGO’s youthful customers will lose a few specific bricks and become frustrated partway through a challenging project. Where the problem originates doesn’t matter; either way, LEGO realizes that it’s a problem for the company. I became aware of this when my ten-year-old was three quarters of the way through a challenging LEGO kit modeled on Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece. “Hey Dad, there are two bricks missing.” Forgetting that my daughter’s twice as smart as me, I cluelessly asked, “Are you sure?” “Yes, Dad, I’m sure,” she responded impatiently, and, of course, she proved to be right. We looked on the web together and discovered that LEGO had a convenient way to order missing pieces, gratis. Super. But what was really super was the letter that came with the replacement bricks. Some highlights:

Thanks for getting in touch with us. I’m sorry there were item(s) missing from your new LEGO set. We try really hard to make sure all LEGO toys are perfect, but sometimes a faulty one sneaks through. Actually—controlling the quality of the toys that leave our factory is a big job (about seven LEGO sets are sold every second!) … and we have a whole department of experts (and machines) who test every LEGO set before it leaves us—they even weigh every box to make sure there’s nothing missing.

We’d like to get even better at catching any faulty LEGO sets, though, so I’m passing your comments on to the team in charge of testing. It’ll help them make sure this doesn’t happen again. [Emphasis mine.]

A response like this can make things better than if things hadn’t gone wrong in the first place, through its well-thought-out, customer-involving approach. It brings a customer closer to the company, because now the customer has gone through this event with your company, has come out the other side, and feels that they’re both on the same team. Note, especially, how the LEGO letter makes a point of including my daughter in the process of improving things at LEGO.

Expect things to go wrong. Plan for this eventuality, keeping the emotional needs of your customer central.

The four components of customer value, interpreted correctly for your particular customer base, will sustain you solidly. Just remember that the definitions in each of these components are built on shifting digital sands. Definitions of perfection, caring delivery, timeliness, and (when things go wrong), responsiveness of resolution are all moving targets. But make the effort to hit them right and you’ll provide true customer value.

“and your point is?”

At the core, what customers require to be satisfied is timeless: value. (Value shouldn’t, by the way, be confused with price.)

Offer solid value and you reliably create customer satisfaction. There are four components to this:

1. A perfect product or service

2. Delivery in a caring, friendly manner

3. Timeliness

4. The backing of an effective problem-resolution process

The definition of a perfect product or service offering is one that’s designed and tested to function perfectly under reasonably foreseeable circumstances and within a reasonable product lifetime.

Nobody rational expects you to create products that will never break down or malfunction in the worst of all possible worlds, but you can’t design glaring defects in and expect a satisfied customer.

Even a perfect product won’t take you far if it’s sunk by uncaring service. And of those two components, the importance of the “caring delivery” component can be disproportionately high. In fact, in a competitive industry, perfection is rarely enough—care and comfort are crucial to reach and retain a customer.

No matter how close to perfect your product is, in the eyes of the customer, if it’s delivered late it’s broken.

Companies need to stay in step with customers’ ever-more-demanding perception of what “in a timely fashion” means. Because if they don’t, their competition will.

You need a well-thought-out, effective problem-resolution process for your inevitable service breakdowns. It needs to be effective at restoring what’s broken and, more important, restoring the customer to a state of satisfaction at least as high as before the breakdown occurred. Done right, you’ll often bind your customers to you even more closely than if the problem hadn’t occurred at all.

A well-thought-out problem-resolution process starts by active “harvesting” of complaints—by being eagerly open to receiving input.

A well-thought-out problem-resolution process means learning to apologize and empathize immediately with the customer’s version of the story, sincerely and without hesitation or equivocation.