Why Customer Happiness Trumps Satisfaction
Jul 25th, 2011 by David Svet
I got another customer satisfaction survey from my bank the other day. Once again a request for me to take my time to tell them how they are doing. Once again a perfectly framed poll asking closed ended questions so that someone, somewhere can report their score delta and check off an item on their to-do list. Blah!
Is customer satisfaction all that you are striving for? Really? If I say I’m satisfied then you’re OK and the world is at one? Satisfaction comes from performance as expected. On a good day, you might exceed my expectations. If you deliver as expected, I’m neutral. Fall short and I’m dissatisfied. Blah! Blah! Blah! You can’t win at this game.
I think it’s the wrong question. Do you really want to know how you’re doing? Ask me if I am happy. Watch my behavior to see if I am happy. Listen to what I say to learn if I share my happiness with others. Because if you make me happy, I’ll be back and I’ll bring my friends.
So, how do you make your customers happy? Look at all of the touch points that they experience with your organization related to your products and services. Look beyond the functional benefits to the emotional and social benefits that you can deliver. Functionality is a baseline proposition — it determines satisfaction. It’s the least common denominator. You and all of your competitors must deliver functionality. It’s required. Premium products and services that truly last deliver emotional and social benefit — also called happiness.
It’s the reason we still have candles. They make us happy. We haven’t needed them to light up a room for a century — they’re functionally obsolete. But, they can deliver an elegant, romantic glow or a luscious, inviting scent that can make you feel better and improve social interaction. So we still buy candles and will pay a premium for fancy ones. A product feature comparison chart between a candle and a light bulb would go badly for the candle. A customer satisfaction survey would likely go the same way — “On a scale of 1-10 is a candle better than, equal to, or worse than a light bulb.” But we still buy them for their emotional and social benefit. Without those, candles would have disappeared a century ago.
As banking evolves it is at risk of further commoditization. Banking is becoming a utility. How many gas or electric utilities serve your community? To drive value for customers it will be necessary to look beyond product and service functionality to the emotional and social benefits that banks can provide. In a recent BAI interview with Jeffrey VanDeVelde from SunTrust, he explained SunTrust’s efforts to design customer experiences that go beyond product functionality.
“At SunTrust, we do that through focusing on our mission, which is to help people and institute prosperity. If we can help a client feel more prosperous, we believe that will be reflected in emotions and behaviors they then exhibit toward us. Prosperous clients, if they feel confident about the economy and their future, tend to buy more, talk to others about us, have higher balances, etc. We really are focusing on how clients feel about themselves.”
So, to get beyond the commoditizing nature of functionaly, SunTrust is intentionally designing customer experiences with the bank to elicit personal happiness. You can do the same for your bank. Consider the following points, some of which were discussed in detail by VanDeVelde in this DMI paper:
• Determine the emotional and social jobs that your customers want to accomplish through financial services in order to feel good about themselves. For example, branches provide social and emotional connection to your customers even though online banking is functionally more efficient.
• Identify the type of happiness that you provide based on the aim of the individual and the locus, or felt source, of the emotions. The aim is either a physical sensation or a higher purpose. The locus, or felt source, is either through others or from within.
• Design your brand experience to accomplish the emotional jobs that your customers want in a manner that maximizes the impact of the type of happiness you produce. Look for key moments when you interact with customers and capitalize on them to deliver positive emotional and social experiences.
• Measure your efforts with moment-by-moment sampling, querying your customers very consistently throughout the process to see if they are happy at that moment rather than use surveys that tend to report satisfaction. Look for queues of happiness and happiness behaviors along with simply asking them if they are happy.
Lasting products and services provide happiness. Commodities provide satisfaction. To avoid further commoditization, focus on designing and delivering customer experiences that deliver happiness, enabling your customers to feel better about themselves and their prosperity.
