Hi Mick,

I agree with your point of Cleaning, Banking, Administration and Paying bills being something you don’t want to notice, however, when you’re comparing changes in service ‘how they used to be’ or ‘how you expect them to be (because of past experience)’ – there’s a big difference when a positive change is made, both immediately and long-term.

If you are in control of the situation and you provide a service that’s ‘not dissatisfying -, that’s great and people can get on with their day without a negative experience. However, if for the small amount of time that your customer interacts with you in these situations, you (as their host) should find it beneficial to both of you to make the customer feel like they’ve just done their ‘usually boring’ trip to the bank and come out with great big smile and feeling really good about themself. A few interactions in a row like that and they could even start to look forward to their daily or weekly bank visit.

I just remembered a slogan from way back ‘we make banking fun’, I can’t remember which bank said that but I’m wondering if it actually was ‘fun’ at that bank? I wonder how they define the word ‘fun’ anyway?

I can see how your theory makes sense but in any situation I would always try to improve the service beyond a level of ‘not dissatisfying’. And yes, I agree that it’s very hard to satisfy everyone, although I do like to think it’s possible.

Paul Groth
http://www.shelbyblue.com
http://www.marketingmixer.com.au

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Mick,

I like your post.

I think you are right in that aiming to satisfy or simply to not dissatisfy can work. But I also believe that this is entirely dependant on the type of product/service/business that you have.

In a blog I wrote a couple of months ago called Benchmarking Satisfaction (http://interaction-dynamics.com/blog/2010/01/benchmarking-satisfaction/) I argued that the satisfaction received by the product/service isn’t always dependant on the product/service itself. Human beings tend to benchmark satisfaction against a range of attributes, making it relative to something else.

In the post I discussed that when people evaluate an experience, they are performing one or more of the following comparisons:

1. Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be
2. Comparing the experience to what they expected it to be
3. Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past
4. Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had

Each of these comparisons makes the evaluation of an experience relative, and this may diminish the experience or enhance it.

So I think when looking at creating a strategy to satisfy/not dissatisfy, you also need to think about where a person’s benchmark may be set.

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In the case of the banks, is it just because we’re so used to being disappointed with them that we’ll accept not being dissatisfied as a “win” of sorts?

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Add into the equation the mini survey at the end of the call, were you happy with the quality of the call? Yes, and I’d be happier if you didn’t ask. Are they checking to satisfy potentially dis satisfied clients? I’d prefer if CS agents 1.. answered the phone within 4 rings, 2. answered MY questions ultra quick, 3. stopped putting me on hold for periods of more than 2 minutes and 4. didn’t ask if I was satisfied with the call. Big corps cutting into my valuable time to develop my business are a NO-NO…. hhhmmm…. suppose I could say that next time a CS agent asks… or invoice them for my valuable time if they really want the answer to that question.

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One of our SaaS clients said the same thing: “We don’t notice when things are good, just when things are bad. In fact your high performance can be a problem … it raises the bar for those areas of our business that don’t use your system.”
It’s an argument that says that if you have time to improve what you do, focus on improving reliability rather than gold plating the service (though our pride in our product means that we spend 50% of our effort constantly working on improving the product).
Recalling my time at a major bank some 12+ years ago, they spent a lot of money adding an extra “9″ to their reliability (1 – probability of failure) and not much on minimising the consequences of failure. Basically, try to avoid a problem as much as possible, but be better prepared if a problem occurs.

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