Excel at Average
Are your customers delighted to be satisfied?
How can you “delight” your customers? You may believe that delighting customers results in repeat visits and loyalty. A great deal of research has been devoted to understanding what experiences create delighted customers.
For some retailers and restaurants, the realm of delight is not a realistic possibility. Consumers may have had previous experiences that diminished expectations, but they continue visiting for price or convenience alone. Increased satisfaction is not going to be easy to achieve for these companies. |
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How do you face this challenge?
Instead of focusing on what delights the customer, focus on your core delivery. Understand the basics of the consumer experience and what defines the many levels of satisfaction that might characterize someone’s experience. Change the basis of your research from what delights consumers to what meets their basic needs.
You need a clear understanding of what behaviors define the levels of acceptability of the key dimensions of the consumer experience. For example, you can calibrate the influence of clean tables relative to surly employees relative to getting items made incorrectly. This kind of information not only gives direction on what to improve but also identifies the minimal level of improvement to keep customers coming back.
Our approach is to address these concerns experimentally, using a choice-based model to discover what the critical behaviors are that influence overall satisfaction and/or intent to return. A two-step process is used where the consumer first identifies the acceptable ranges of behavior then evaluates simulated experiences.
To determine the acceptable range of behavior, consumers are asked to rank order a series of items concerning cleanliness in a restaurant, from the least acceptable to the most acceptable. In addition, they would be asked to identify several key points along the continuum of acceptability. Specifically, they would identify the expected level of performance, the level where performance is unacceptable and the point at which they would not return. In other words, what level of behavior constitutes a deal-breaker? Similar exercises would be completed for other key performance attributes.
In the second stage, consumers would be presented with pairs of simulated experiences (including descriptions of performance levels on cleanliness, speed, accuracy, etc. identified in the first step) and asked to indicate which is more acceptable. Analysis permits a full understanding of how each service experience influences overall satisfaction and future choice.
Conducting this type of study provides a great deal of information about what drives loyalty, especially for branding, training, and marketing initiatives — not to mention defining ways to improve your satisfaction “average.”
For more information about how you can take your customer sat. research to the next level, call or e-mail Alex Sodek (800.800.2124 x232).
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