Recently, I had one of those Wow! reactions that we're all working so hard to get our customers to experience. I was running a two-day, offsite meeting for a client at a Florida hotel. The first day's meeting was to begin at 8 a.m. I arrived at the meeting room at 7 a.m. to make final preparations and see that everything was in order. At about 7:15 a.m., the hotel's banquet manager came in to introduce himself. "Is everything to your liking?" he asked. "Yup. Looks great," I replied. "Do you know about our gold switch?" My puzzled look gave him his answer. He led me to the back of the room and pointed out a light switch covered by a "gold" plate. A small, red light bulb was mounted on the wall just above the switch. "If you need anything at all at any point in your meeting, just flip this switch" -- he did; the red bulb lit up -- "and someone will be right in to help you." He pulled out his walkie-talkie and pushed the transmit button: "Ignore the light in Ballroom A. Just a test." Fast forward about 40 minutes. One of the meeting participants approached me with a harried look. "I forgot to bring some papers," she said, holding up a stack of about 25 pages. "I'm going to run to the front desk to see if I can get some copies made. Can you wait until I get back before you start the meeting?" "Theoretically," I said, guiding her toward the back of the room, "you shouldn't have to go to the front desk. All we have to do is flip this switch, and someone should be right in to help." I activated the cutting-edge gold-switch technology. Thirty seconds later, a hotel employee entered the meeting room. "Can we get some copies made?" I asked. "No problem, sir," he said. Five minutes later, he returned with the copies. Wow, I thought. Fast forward to the following morning. I'm back in Ballroom A, setting up for day two of the meeting, when the banquet manager comes in. "How'd it go yesterday?" he asked. "Great," I said. "Your gold switch is a terrific idea. It really puts my mind at ease to know it's there if I need it." "It's great for us, too," he said, nodding enthusiastically. "It puts my mind at ease to know my customers aren't running around the building looking for help." Question: How do you get that sort of thing -- a terrific idea, simple and inexpensive to implement and clearly beneficial to both your customer and you -- to happen? Answer: By conducting a fundamentally different kind of conversation with your customers. In last month's column, I talked about the shortcomings of measuring and monitoring customer satisfaction, arguing that the process is inherently self-absorbed. Although it does involve customers, it's fundamentally still about you. Institutionally speaking, a customer satisfaction survey asks, "How are we doing?" It also follows a narrowly bounded line of questioning: "Regarding those things that we've determined are important enough to ask you about, how are we doing?" And it's inherently inside-the-box: "Regarding those things that you expect us to be doing, how are we doing?" So how do you get outside-the-box ideas? Asking the question directly tends not to work: "How can we better meet those needs you don't realize you have?" Wow-inducing insights generally are not expressed directly by customers; they must be inferred by you. What's needed is a way to understand your customers more profoundly. If you have a better understanding of who they are and what makes them tick, you are more likely to come up with outside-the-box ideas. You will see more clearly where customers' real needs intersect with your organizational capabilities. Or, said another way, breakthrough insight occurs when the relevant expertise collides with inarticulated customer needs. If the Florida hotel's focus had been on customer satisfaction ("How are we doing?"), it would have asked people like me -- i.e., people running the meetings taking place in their hotel -- questions about the tables and chairs, water pitchers and mint bowls, audiovisual support and all the rest. They might even have asked me to rate their responsiveness to my needs. Because I expected to have to chase someone down to, for example, make some last-minute copies, as long as the hotel's performance after I'd located someone was up to my expectations, I would likely have given them a high satisfaction score. But they demonstrated a more profound understanding of their customers that enabled them to make some simple but important distinctions. To them, setting up the rooms for my meeting was just another day at the office. To me, that's exactly what it wasn't. The meeting was offsite for a reason: We had to deal with important things, so we took the extraordinary step to get away from the daily routine in order to deal with them. To the hotel, the meeting's essentials were the tables, chairs, water pitchers and mint bowls. To me, the meeting's content was most important; the rest was minutiae. Had the hotel seen its goal as customer satisfaction, its operations would have been informed by this notion: "We want all the things we do to work right." And that's fine as far as it goes. But it misses what could be. My guess is that the hotel employees' goals were entirely different: "This is an important meeting for this guy, and he's entrusting it to us." That informing notion would lead them down the following thought path: "He wants to focus on the meeting's content; we need to eliminate the hassles. In fact, we want to give him the sense of security that goes with knowing that someone is on call to help." It isn't hard to see how such reasoning can lead to installing gold switches. Customer satisfaction is important. It's essential to know how you're doing. But it is silent on what could be. Those outside-the-box ideas reside at the intersection of your organization's capabilities and your customers' inarticulated needs. To ferret those out, you need to engage your customers in a fundamentally different institutional conversation, one that's about them rather than about you. About the author John Guaspari is a senior associate with Rath & Strong Management Consultants, a division of Aon Corp. His books include I Know It When I See It (AMACOM, 1991) and Customer Connection (AMACOM, 1988). E-mail him at jguaspari@qualitydigest.com
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