You think you provide Customer Satisfaction, think again!

A few weeks back I was talking to an Executive team about the need to improve Customer Satisfaction and that this would amount to a Transformation for this Organisation: I was somewhat surprised by statements such as "We don't have a Customer Satisfaction issue", "It's all about price", “We provide everything the Customer needs, sure we could do better but we’ll get there”, “The Customer would not appreciate the service”, “Loyalty will never be what it used to be because of Industry 4.0”. To try an illustrate my point and since we had all travelled to a hotel I asked them to recount their journey from the airport. The main question I wanted to get them to answer was “who was servicing them”.

Was it the shuttle company? Was it the airport? Was it the hotel? Was it the ATM company who had cash machines at airport and hotel? Surprisingly the majority of answers were that we were customers of all these providers. When I said that we were just the Customer of the hotel I got asked why and why this mattered. When I asked if every provider that helped me get to hotel did a good job most answers said “I hope so, nothing difficult there, lots of simple tasks so unless something went wrong then I should be happy”. So when I said “nothing went wrong but I am really an unhappy Customer” I got challenged. Allow me to recount what happened to me and see if you understand why before I provide an explanation:

• Step 1 - Question to hotel if they provide a bus shuttle to airport Answer: Yes. Well not quite: there is a bus shuttle company and it is not for free but no one told me at hotel.
• Step 2 – Step on bus and go to pay by Credit Card since it says it on the side of the bus and there is a machine by the driver. Well not quite: Bus driver tells me the machine does not work, never did and that I must pay in cash. No cash so what to do? “No problem Sir, get money from hotel and join the bus at next stop across the road”
• Step 3 – Ask Hotel for cash. “We don’t do this Sir but there is an ATM there”. (Now remember I was not told by Concierge the night before that I would need to pay nor was I told that hotel would not give me cash or allow me to buy a ticket). So I get cash out of the ATM so should be happy. Well not quite: The fare is 5 GBP, I can only draw out 10 GBP and the ATM will charge me 1.98 GBP for the privilege… No choice but to draw 10 GBP that cost me 12GBP and now pay 6.98 GBP for bus ride. Did I also forget to say that ATM did not give receipt?
• Step 4 – get on the bus and make it to airport, end of Customer Journey

“So anybody have an issue with this?” I ask. “What else could be done?”, “Every one needs to get paid”, “Hotel did its job by providing ATM”… To that I replied “If you don’t see anything wrong with this story this is the reason why increasing Customer Satisfaction needs to be a Transformation for your Organisation. You did not recognise that I was the Customer of the hotel and that the hotel could have made this so much simpler and so much more pleasant with different thinking”. When asked what this had to do with Lean, Industry 4.0 and the Design For Value workshop we were all here for I simply said “Lean Thinking and Industry 4.0 is all about providing Customer Satisfaction before and after he comes in contact with you”. I further said “let me explain why Lean on its own would not suffice to fix this Customer Satisfaction issue, why Design Thinking either but why Design-For-Value would”:

• Lean on its own says that Value is what Customer is prepared to pay for, something that transforms the item going through the process and which is done once. I got to the airport so value was delivered. Sure some improvements could be made. What Lean did not pick up is my User Experience, something that Design Thinking would have.
• Design Thinking would have focussed on User Experience and would have probably helped digitise the process to take away the paying “pain” but would have not picked up some of the wastes identified by Lean Thinking.
• Combine the two, what we call Design For Value, and now you are talking. We would not only simplify the process, we would automate it and in such a way that all users in the process enjoy the experience, i.e. the bus driver, the hotel and me. By focussing on me as the Customer of the Value Stream and others as Users it was possible to create Customer Satisfaction while making this a positive and profitable experience for all Users.

Notice how the ATM step and pain disappeared? Notice how we not only handled Value and Emotion?

What we all witnessed was suboptimisation at its best, i.e. each provider in his “own” value stream trying to improve Customer Satisfaction within his boundaries. And here comes another important concept when considering any Digital Transformation: The Hotel should have remembered what the “Job To Be Done” (JTBD) for the Customer was, not about what it can do within its boundaries, not about an App, not about providing cash facilities, not about improving existing steps within the process… My JTBD was simply getting from hotel to airport. Unless you understand who the Customer is and what his JTBD is you will fail at providing Customer Satisfaction. Making a fundamentally bad process better will always end up being a bad process. Whether is it less bad is irrelevant.

I am not at liberty to describe which company this was, what the solution was but what I can say is that the combination of the Job-To-Be-Done concept and Design-For-Value got us to think about how this Organisation could take care of its Customers before, during and after they were “touched”. I can also say that none of us would have imagined the Solution we came up with.

So as I said in my opening statement: You think you provide Customer Satisfaction, think again!