Extreme Customer Satisfaction

This morning I attended a presentation by Rudy Vidal, and had a moment to chat with him afterwards. Rudy is a respected “Customer Satisfaction” consultant, and he described some of the research he did when he worked at a large consumer electronics company. That company, like so many others, is dealing with the problem of “commoditization”—the products and services from one company aren’t much different from what’s offered by its competitors. To discover strategies for competing in this environment he surveyed 20,000 customers and asked two questions. 1—How satisfied were you with your recent purchase (response options were Dissatisfied, Satisfied, and Extremely Satisfied), and 2—Would you recommend our product or buy it again? Among those who were “Satisfied,” 13 percent would buy again and 17 percent would recommend. However, among those who were “Extremely Satisfied,” 64 percent would buy again and 73 percent would recommend to others. The “Extremely Satisfieds” were five times as likely to recommend the product as those who were simply “Satisfied.”

With that insight, he went back to those who described themselves as “Extremely Satisfied” and asked them why they chose that designation. He’d given no standard for the survey participants to use—he let them choose for themselves. 87 percent of those who were most happy said they were so satisfied because “I received more than I expected.” He then noted that the “more” didn’t need to be a big thing—it just needed to be a pleasant surprise. It may not be logical that a very small extra would cause such a jump in loyalty, but, he noted, “Loyalty is not a logical human reaction. Loyalty is an emotional reaction. We’re loyal to people because of how they make us feel.” Whenever customers leave saying “Hey—that was nice,” the environment is right to build loyalty.

A couple of days ago in my post on “Ten Lessons,” I wrote “Clients work with people they like even more than people who are competent.” That’s indicative of this same idea—even more than good products or good services, people are looking today for good experiences. We’ll work harder on giving each of our clients a great experience in addition to great work. And we’ll do our best to remind clients that branding is basically all about the experience their customers have with them on many levels.

STEPHEN HALES