Imbue Consulting -ARTICLES_ Going Beyond Satisfaction

Take a drive down the main road in any city and read the billboards. You'll see any number of marketing pitches featuring language like "Satisfaction guaranteed "Your satisfaction is our number-one goal," or "We are #1 in customer satisfaction."

You might assume that satisfaction was the ticket to high praise, robust profits, and repeat business. But unless your organization is the only fish in the pond, using customer satisfaction as a yardstick of success will ultimately lead to disappointment, maybe even failure.
As a growing amount of service quality research has found, measures of "satisfaction" are often poor predictors of the most important of all customer service goals: Will customers who visit you once keep coming back for more? Will they stay fervently loyal, producing the welcome byproducts of lower marketing or customer acquisition costs, fewer defections, more word-of-mouth recommendations, and ultimately stronger profits?
While the use of rating terms like "very satisfied" or "satisfied" on customer surveys might be sufficient to gauge customers' assessment of products, these descriptors often fall woefully short of predicting customer loyalty. This loyalty can be defined as a firm intention to repurchase and an intense desire to recommend to others. Satisfaction surveys, on the other hand, may be tracking more emotion-laden or sensory service experiences.

The majority of things we buy are acquired with basic needs in mind. If we are evaluating the merits of a new trash compactor, for example, we focus on its reliability, cost, and how effectively it gobbles trash. We don't care if it plays Mozart as trash is crunched or if, out of a sense of loyalty to its owners, it refuses to call the Environmental Protection Agency when inappropriate items are funneled into it. We have little emotional involvement in such purchases.

Think of a service situation when your emotions ran high. Maybe it was your honeymoon, a five-star dining experience, or an attempt to get an organization to correct yet another error on a bill or account statement. Let's assume a market researcher was seeking to gauge your evaluation of one of those experiences. Pulling out his handy-dandy survey, he asks you: "On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being 'completely unsatisfied' and 10 being 'completely satisfied,' what would be your overall evaluation of your honeymoon?"
Recalling the full moon on the water, the soft breeze on the balcony, the sweet taste of champagne-or other extracurricular activities-you would likely be struck by how far short "completely satisfied" fell of capturing your true evaluation of that special experience. "Is 'awesome' one of the choices?" you query the interviewer. "No," the surveyor responds. "'Completely satisfied' is our highest rating. We are scientists, not touchy-feely counselors!"
"But you're asking me about an emotional experience," you persist. "Of course we are," pipes the researcher. "We rely on rigorous methods grounded in solid research. And emotional language like 'awesome' clearly has no place in this process. So, just give me a number. Were you satisfied or not?"

On the surface, you might spot an easy route around this grading dilemma. Why not make the top end of the scale more than satisfied?" But the challenge with this path is that "more than" is a different paradigm all together. Satisfaction is about sufficiency, and "more than sufficient" is like saying, "I bought this trash compacter to crunch up my garbage, but if you really want to capture my loyalty as a consumer, make it do something it was not intended to do." Satisfaction is state of completeness-either it is or it is not. If satisfaction were a bucket to be filled, the best you could get would be "completely satisfied"-as in, "to the top."
The rational side of you might be thinking, "But most service experiences are far more ordinary than a honeymoon." Let's examine that belief more closely.

The word "service," derived from the Latin seruire, meaning "to act as a servant," connotes the act of meeting a customer's need or requirement, just as a product does. What is different is that a service experience, in many cases, occurs in a way that involves a more extended human-to-human interaction.