The Hindu Business Line : Is customer delight a viable goal?

Managements would be better off refining and perfecting processes and making them error-free and fail-proof rather than aspiring for the elusive goal of customer delight, says S. ANANTHARAMAN.

It is a given that businesses are sustained by customers. Satisfied customers keep a business afloat while delighted customers make it grow by leaps and bounds. If we accept this posit, the logical corollary is that all successful businesses delight their customers. Right?

Is customer delight the differentiator that sets apart the victors from the also-rans? Will companies be best advised to follow a policy that consciously makes delight possible?

Or is customer delight a smokescreen that prevents managements from addressing basic issues related to processes, which alone sustain consistent performance over time? This is a complex question that does not have straight answers.

Former President of the Royal Scandinavian Airlines Jan Carlzon wrote in his book Moments of Truth: "Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression." It is at these moments that a company either causes customer delight or customer dismay or in most cases of successful companies what I would term as "customer comfort."

Let me first define customer comfort and customer delight and then illustrate them with some of my personal experiences as a customer for the last four decades. When performance equals expectation there is comfort; when performance exceeds expectation delight is experienced and when it grossly falls short, it results in customer dismay.

PIZZA MUDDLE

Some years back, we ordered pizza at a Pizza Hut outlet in Brighton in the UK. My wife was specific about two things "quick delivery, as the children were weak with hunger, and no mushrooms." The response was just the opposite. The pizzas were painfully late and covered with a thin layer of diced mushroom. Dismayed, we confronted the outlet manager who apologised profusely and promised to have fresh pizzas served without the offending fungi.

This assurance was followed by another long delay and by now the children were baying to eat; mushroom or otherwise and so did my friend and I, and my wife after carefully divesting the pizza of the mushroom pieces. When the last pieces of the pizza were consumed the young waitress walked over with hot pizzas "sans mushrooms." I informed her that their delay and our hunger had a mismatch and we had already consumed the pizzas.

The waitress was confused and walked to the manager with the problem of what to bill us for - whether we should be also billed for the new set of mushroom-free pizzas or only for the mushroom pizzas we had consumed.

We were wondering what the manager would do while getting ready to settle the amount in full. When we were discussing the rights and wrongs of the billing philosophy of pizza outlets, the manager walked up to us and once again apologised for the delay and the faulty execution of our order and said that he would be delighted to give us the new mushroom-free pizzas with his compliments. No medals for guessing what the general feeling at this unexpected bonanza was. My son stopped short of doing a cartwheel there and then.

RAIL EXPERIENCE

The best experience was while returning from Stratford-upon-Avon to Shoreham-on-the sea where my host lived. We caught a train in the afternoon at Stratford to Victoria in London and through a chain of connections through Victoria and Brighton hoped to reach Shoreham by 10 p.m. — very late, but we had no choice, or so we thought. We sat in the comfortable second-class coach of the train and saw the endless stretches of British countryside fly past. Then appeared a ticket examiner who was quite appreciative of an Indian, his wife and two children. After finding out what my final destination was, he made a couple of calls on his CUG cell phone and made a suggestion that was music to our ears. Instead of going all the way to Victoria we could switch trains at Reading where there was a direct service to Shoreham. Thanks to his efforts, I ended up saving 30 pounds and four hours. . The latter was more important as we didn't want our hosts (busy doctors) to wait up till 10 p.m. for us. To me this thoughtful ticket examiner is the finest and most enduring memory of British rail.

CASE STUDIES

Now let us study these cases, which were obviously instances of wow in customer service. In the pizza case, there was a failure of process and it was the manager's attitude (to avoid customer complaint) and the organisation's policy (empowering the manager) that turned what was most surely a disaster into triumph. But this success had a price tag. One, the cost of the complimentary pizzas, and, two, the bad publicity of being shown up as inefficient at first. The act of the manager was an instance of good service recovery, which is not a substitute to good service delivery.

The manager had failed in "input" to ensure proper performance of process but had compensated by "outgo" in offering a free pizza. I do not know if the firm penalised the manager for the free pizzas which were occasioned by a consequence of poor supervision and training. Most probably the case was touted as an outstanding instance of service recovery where failure was converted to customer delight and rewarded thereby further adding to the company's cost in achieving customer delight.

On the contrary, a diligent manager who ensured that systems and process happened in a fail-safe manner would have ensured customer comfort but would not have had a story to tell. Like it or not, all of us are fond of stories but should hard-nosed managements be distracted by stories?

These cases go to prove that much of management thought has gone into, and successfully, in reorienting attitudes of organisations from being self-centric to customer-centric in that the four rungs of an organisation have got inverted. Originally, the first rung used to be the top management, the second the middle management, the third was the frontline staff and the last was the customers. This has now been turned on its head thanks to the awareness that it is the customer who is the king and not the CEO. The Dell motto "Think customer" and the Burger King catchline "Have it your way" sum up this ethos.

CUSTOMER DISMAY

Now for some horror stories. In a Rotterdam departmental store I had purchased a small leather purse that cost 29 guilders in the pre-euro days and some other odds and ends and had handed over a 50-guilder note and waited for 6 guilders to be returned. The clerk at the till said that there was no remainder to be paid to me and naturally, being good at basic arithmetic, I refused to give up.

Seeing the mild altercation the store manager stepped in and after a minute asked the cash register to be closed and the stock of cash taken. In all of five minutes it was evident that the till had 6 guilders more than accounted for by the cash register. The manager apologised on behalf of the clerk profusely and suggested that I might like to pick up a shirt in lieu of the inconvenience caused. I politely declined the offer and pocketed the change.

Was there customer delight in this case? Certainly not, but there was customer vindication that resulted in a sort of salve to the bruised pride at having been accused of demanding money not due. Full marks to the manager for having behaved in a fair manner, instead of siding with the staff or asking the customer to come the following day when the accounts for the previous day are drawn up. Who would go for 6 guilders (Rs 120) is another question.

Back home, I recently purchased a jar of guava preserve made by a premium jam company. To my utter horror, I found three large black ants floating on the surface when I opened the bottle. This was shocking as the product had all the impressive certifications.

I took the trouble to write to the customer cell of the company and after a month a courier called my mobile five times to seek detailed instructions to my house and finally delivered a bottle of jam after taking away the ant-garnished product. Of course, he also took a number of my signatures to the effect that I won't sue the company and that I was glad to receive the bottle of jam in "full and final settlement of my claim".

PROCESS FAILURES

The reader will see that these cases are direct result of process failures. Service recoveries had to be effected at considerable expense to avoid dissatisfaction and, worse, lawsuits for damages.

In the backdrop of these, Philip Kotler's idealist exhortation — "It is no longer enough to satisfy customers but you must delight them" — seems highly misplaced if not naïve.

In all cases, except the railway one, the delight was occasioned by an initial goof-up. This brings us to the basic question whether customer delight is a goal worth attempting when even the basics are shaky. On the other hand, cases of customer delight distract from process failures and imbue a false sense of performance in the company.

Therefore, managements would be better off refining and perfecting the processes and making them error-free and fail-proof rather than aspiring for the elusive goal of customer delight. Delight connotes enjoyment and extreme happiness. Most customers don't look for delight in a product or service but an acceptable level of comfort.

Therefore, it stands to logic that a firm must aim to satisfy the largest body of its customers and this is best done by concentrating on and perfecting the less glamorous but most important nitty-gritty of processes. Efficient processes consistently delivered drive costs down and enhance profits whereas customer delight occasioned by process glitches bleeds the company and reduces contribution.

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