Do you annoy your customers?
I love that sign you see every once in a while in a diner or dry-cleaners:
“If you loved our service tell your friends, if not tell us.”
That’s a great sentiment and was probably hung on the wall to send the message that management is truly interested in quality service and being responsive to customer complaints.
The problem is, we all tend to do the opposite. If the service/food/employees were great we tell the cashier on the way out. If any aspect of the experience was lousy, we tell all our friends to stay away.
Then comes this Harvard Business Publishing Management tip of the day: Does Your Product Annoy Your Customers? The article talks about how computer vendor’s increasing tendency to install unwanted software on their products (bloatware) has lead to a new market for Best Buy to offer a $30 service to remove it all.
The article, as written, is not so much a cautionary tale about services that annoy, even enrage your customers. It ends up on a much more interesting note, which is the opportunities created by those annoyances. Even more interesting, the author implies that the market simply can’t resist piling on to money-making ideas, so there will always be a steady stream of annoyances to take advantage of.
Relating this to our own personal branding and pursuit of excellence, I see two themes here:
- Always be vigilant that you are not annoying your customers. This means looking through their eyes, not your own. It doesn’t matter if you see it as a value-add or an additional revenue stream, it matters whether it adds value to them.
- Opportunities always abound to fill the gap between what the market is asking for and what they are being provided. Even simpler is providing a less frustrating experience. Since this means focusing on delivering only what the customer is asking for, you may have the opportunity to deliver better perceived value at a lower cost. Voila – excellence!
This all reminds me of a simple equation I had written on the whiteboard in my office for the longest time:
Satisfaction = Perception – Expectations
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