Now that I've gotten your attention with this column's headline, let me begin with a disclaimer: Customer satisfaction is important, and measuring it is a good thing to do. If you don't, you're missing a sure bet. My issue is not with what customer satisfaction is; it's with what it isn't, or at least what it shouldn't be, which is the keystone of your organization's efforts to forge strong customer connections. If it is, you're missing an even bigger, more important bet. One of the basic tenets of quality management is that companies should strive to operate in a mode of prevention rather than inspection. A strategy based on finding and fixing defects after they've already occurred will ultimately be a losing one. But what is a customer satisfaction survey--i.e., asking customers to check for conformance between what they got and what they expected--if not an inspection? Simply asserting a strategic goal of operating in prevention mode doesn't legislate defects out of existence. Eliminating customer satisfaction measurement by philosophical fiat--"Inspection is the wrong approach, therefore we will cease all inspections"--is arrogant at best, foolhardy at worst. Most organizations will still need to know whether their customers' "inspections" are uncovering any defects. The danger lies in equating a customer connection strategy with measuring customer satisfaction. It's a mistake to say, "We've got that customer connection stuff covered. We do a regular satisfaction survey." Why? For the same reason that inspection is a dangerous and potentially fatal quality strategy. It's like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. Although companies might call them customer satisfaction surveys, what they are measuring isn't actually customer satisfaction but the absence of customer dissatisfaction. This is an important distinction, because to the extent that customer satisfaction lies at the heart of an organization's customer connection strategy, it is saying, in effect, "Our goal is to make sure we don't drive our customers away from us." And while that's certainly a good thing to avoid, it's hardly the stuff of sustainable competitive advantage. You shouldn't want simply to prevent customers from leaving; you should want to pull them toward you. You shouldn't want simply to avoid creating negative experiences for customers; you should want to create positive ones for them. You shouldn't want simply to not lose; you should want to win. An overly intensive focus on customer satisfaction blurs the distinction between a necessary operating condition (i.e., avoiding problems) and a strategic imperative (i.e., delivering value to customers). None of the above should be read as an indictment of customer satisfaction, the regular measurement of which should be as much a part of standard institutional practice as cutting payroll checks, creating advertising campaigns and running the office Super Bowl pool. Moreover, customer satisfaction measurement can point you in the general direction of customer value. However, when customer satisfaction is expected to provide a means for creating more customer value, it inevitably comes up short. At such times, remember Mark Twain's admiring observation after seeing a poodle trained to walk on its hind legs: "It's not that it does it well. It's that it does it at all." The problem is not one of desire, but of design. A customer satisfaction survey--in fact, the very concept of customer satisfaction--is fundamentally ill-suited to sharpen an organization's focus on customer value. To understand why, consider the two responses that come up most frequently in answer to the question, "Why do you measure customer satisfaction?" The first is always, "Because it can give us information essential to running the business more effectively." To which I say, "Absolutely correct." It's the second answer that reveals the problem: "To make us less self-absorbed. We're spending a lot of time and money focusing very intensively on our internal work processes. We need a way to broaden our horizons and counter that self-absorption." Sounds sensible. Too bad it's exactly wrong. If you could boil down the typical customer satisfaction survey to a single question, what would it be? "How are we doing?" Or, "How did we do?" Notice the pronoun "we." To whom does it refer? To the company asking the questions, not the customer answering them. So the focus is still on you. This won't go far toward lowering the level of institutional self-absorption. This doesn't mean that organizations shouldn't conduct such surveys. Knowing whether they have delivered what their customers expected from them is crucial. When they do so, however, they are still focusing on their own operations and work processes, not on their customers' needs. To uncover what constitutes customer value (the real secret to business success), the focus has to be on them, not on you. The fundamental question should not be, "How are we doing?" but, "How are you doing?" Your customer connections must not only answer "Did we do what we set out to do?" but also "How can we do what you need us to do?" Next month's column will offer advice on how to make that small but essential shift in focus. About the author John Guaspari is a senior associate of the Lexington, Massachusetts-based management consulting firm, Rath & Strong. The books he has written include I Know It When I See It and The Customer Connection. Copyright 1998 by John Guaspari. |
