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Eighty percent of companies surveyed by Bain & Company said they deliver a "superior experience" to their customers.
Did the customers agree? Not at all. They said that only eight percent of companies delivered a superior experience.
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Customer expectations increased over five percent in the first three months of 2005 alone, according to a survey by Brand Keys, a New York research firm. At the same time, services failed to keep pace. While expectations of mobile phones and long distance providers increased ten and eight percent respectively, the ability of companies in those industries to meet those needs fell 18 and 22 percent.
Implications
The Lake Wobegon Effect remains real. Humans are prone to Overconfidence Bias: we consistently think we are better than we are. That assumption, and the complacency it encourages, explains why companies everywhere are failing to satisfy people's growing demands.
If you're doing what you did last year, you're doing worse. Satisfaction is the gap between your performance and people's expectations of it, and expectations across all industries have risen. That means that unless you have done something to improve, your clients feel less satisfied today than they felt a year ago.
You cannot copy the best services in your industry. As an industry declines, you might assume that customers would adjust their expectations downward. Airline customers, for example, presumably would adjust to the airlines' decades of problems by simply expecting less. But they haven't; airlines' abilities to meet customer expectations fell over 21 percent.
What does this mean? Customers do not measure companies like yours against your competitors. They measure you against the best providers: Jet Blue, Starbucks, Federal Express and Four Seasons Hotels. If a coffee shop staffed by kids overcharging us for coffee can deliver a superior experience, customers have decided, why can't everyone?
Two recommendations
Do anything. The problem with so many service initiatives is that they are months in the planning, discussion and refinement. By the end of this ordeal, the zealots are exhausted. If the company actually gets past this to the stage of executing, they commit the next mistake: they prescribe too much. Handed the long list of changes, and calculating the time they have simply to get through their to-do's each day, employees put off until tomorrow. Don't make the task impossible. Suggest just one or two changes at a time.
Involve the Alphas. If your top executives aren't involved and cheerleading your service improvement initiative, most employees will decide that the initiative doesn't matter. Involve the top immediately; don't even move to execution until you have.
Excerpts from Harry and Christine Clifford Beckwith's new book, You: A Field Guide to Selling Yourself (Warner Books September 2006).
At a recent week-long engagement in Florida, our hosts put us up at resort where "You get what you pay for" should have dictated that we'd be served like Crown Princes.
Instead, we were served like prawns. Three times we called the golf shop and let the phone ring for two minutes; no answer. Twice we called the bell captain and once the concierge; same result. A waitress passed our table in the lobby bar eight times one evening without once pausing to ask if we wanted anything. (It was 84 degrees out. We wanted anything she had that was cold, except her stare.)
Our robes check out after the first night, and a day later the towels did, too. We. . . it goes on.
What is going on?
Welcome, New Clients:
Novartis, Basel, Switzerland
LPL Financial Services, Boston and San Diego, USA
Seminarium, Caracas, Venezuela
The Lighter Side
It's tempting to name this list "The Ten Best Songs of All Time," but who am I to say? I can say these are the songs I play most often on my iPod:
1. Landslide, Fleetwood Mac
2. Burning Down The House, Talking Heads
3. Under My Thumb, The Rolling Stones
4. Devil With a Blue Dress, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels
5. Stones in the Road, Mary Chapin Carpenter
6. Gimme Some Lovin', Spencer Davis Group
7. Fields of Gold, Sting
8. Crazy, Seal
9. White Flag, Dido
10. Time After Time, Cyndi Lauper
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Harry Beckwith is the best-selling author of Selling
the Invisible, which has been named one of the top
ten business books of all time, with over 675,000
copies sold in 14 translations. He is also author of
The Invisible Touch and What Clients Love, which
have sold over 275,000 copies in 13 translations. He has been a keynote speaker for 14 Fortune 200 annual sales meetings and the National Speakers' Association convention, and has |
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made presentations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is
cited regularly in national media including CNN,
The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur,
Crain's New York Business and numerous
American, European and Asian newspapers. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Harry resides in Minneapolis with his wife Christine Clifford Beckwith. He is the father of six children. |
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E-mail questions and comments for Harry Beckwith to invisble@bitstream.net.