How to thrill your customers.

• Author: Motley, L. Biff
• Position: Customer Satisfaction

An interesting article, which appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal, brought home to me a memorable principle authored by Dr. Jim Donnelly, dean of the ABA School of Bank Marketing and Management. The principle is that there are "satisfiers" and "dissatisfiers" in a customer's perception of a bank. And that a marketer's strategy should try to fix any dissatisfiers to levels of expectation only (don't worry about thrilling clients with these) and to focus on maximizing the satisfiers, which will thrill your clients. I will come back to this, but first let me share with you the essence of the survey conducted by the Journal.

The article discussed the confusion customers experience surrounding the purchase of new, technical products like a home theater or home wireless network. A mystery shopper visited five purveyors of these gadgets with the request for help in buying a home theater system for under $1,000. The stores were Circuit City, Best Buy, ,Sony, Wal-Mart and Bang & Olufsen. All of the sellers, with the exception of B&O, stumbled through a number of dissatifiers ranging from nonworking kiosks, to poorly designed "take-one" information sheets, to uninformed, hurried or even rude sales associates. In one instance, an employee said, "Yeah, I hear you. I will be right back," and never returned. Another "sales consultant" got impatient and finally said. "Look, sweetheart. They are both good. It's just up to you which one you want to buy!"

Self-service sections were even worse, with nonfunctioning kiosks and touch screens that were presumptive, hard to see or even turned off. The article described any number of dissatisfying episodes, which failed to answer the shopper's specific questions.

The winner, by far, was Bang & Olufsen, which is a higher-priced vendor of fancy electronics, supported by knowledgeable consultants. At B&O, a "senior audio/video consultant" spent 90 minutes answering questions and going through all the possibilities, and at one point said, "I like to help people make intelligent decisions."

The value of satisfied customers

Now, back to Jim Donnelly's principle. Clearly, the "satisfier" in this case was a knowledgeable consultant who listened and helped craft a solution for our client. The dissatifiers were poorly trained or managed employees; nonworking technology; and inadequately designed self-service concepts. It is clear that...