Let’s take a quick vote…raise your hand if you would be really happy if everything you did and experienced in life was AVERAGE? Of course you wouldn’t…it’s a silly question, right? We go through life expecting spectacular and exciting and incredible and awesome…we put up with the average but look forward to the remarkable.
When we say we are “satisfied” it’s like saying we want average…the norm. No we don’t…we want AMAZING!
Here’s the dilemma. Why is it, as business leaders, we feel good when we say we have satisfied our customers and our customer satisfaction survey’s tell us we did a good job at that. Doesn’t this mean we feel good we were able to give our customers average? Maybe for some (maybe most) this is OK. But here’s the wakeup call…your customers don’t think so…they want REMARKABLE…just like you do when you are a customer. They settle for average…being satisfied…but they want remarkable. And if you don’t believe this, just put 100 of your top customers in a room and ask them if they would prefer you gave them a remarkable experience over an average experience. You already know the answer because it’s the same answer you would give if you were asked the same question as a customer!
After writing my first book we coined a phrase that really seemed to resonate with people…especially customers. We said, “Being ‘satisfied ‘ is simply looking for the next best deal.” This meant that when a customer said they were satisfied they were “content” for the moment…not ecstatic, just content. When asked if they were loyal and were not pursuing other options, they said, “Of course not, I am always keeping my eyes open in case something better comes along”…they were always looking for the next best deal.
But here’s where things get interesting.
When the customer said they loved their experience and were loyal to the company, they told us they rarely looked for other deals…they were happy where they were. They didn’t feel “satisfied” or “average,” they felt “special” and rewarded the organization by giving them their loyalty.
So the next time you strive for “high customer satisfaction” rankings in your organization, I would challenge you to rethink what you are really retrying to accomplish and what you are really asking for from your customers. This is essentially saying you want all your customers to feel “average” about their experience with you or do…when in reality you really want them to feel REMARKABLE!
I passionately believe “delivering satisfaction” is a path to extinction.
The Internet Economy has given us, the consumers and buyers of goods, too many choices for “satisfaction” to survive. The customer…your customers…are demanding remarkable. The challenge for leaders today is to make a decision about which path you want your customers to be on into the future…SATISFIED OR REMARKABLE.
The Internet is brutal…it takes no prisoners and it isn’t very compassionate. Yet when leveraged correctly, it can set you apart and share your awesome experiences with tens of thousands in seconds. When your customers feel special and have a remarkable experience, the Internet Economy can be your best friend as a business leader. It can give you amazing differentiation and build your brand faster than any other time in history. But when you aren’t remarkable and you deliver satisfaction, it can make you irrelevant just as fast. This is the challenge we, as leaders, face every day in the new economy. But the great part of all of this…the choice of which way we want our company to go is always ours to make.
