By Jim Mikula, President/CEO
At the heart of excellent service is understanding the customer’s conditions of satisfaction. Many years ago, I was fortunate to study the leadership and management theories of Fernando Flores and learned some finer distinctions of customer satisfaction.
Studying Flores’ model of workflow looks at a cycle of a customer/performer relationship that begins with a customer’s request or a provider’s offer all the way through to the customer declaring satisfaction. Along the cycle, the parties agree upon a promise and hopefully, delivery of the service or product. However, the workflow is not complete until the customer says, “thank you” and expresses satisfaction.
Sometimes, the “performer” delivers a service or product that is only partially satisfactory or is unsatisfactory. That is where the understanding of both explicit and implicit conditions of satisfaction are critical. The magic of great customer service lies in uncovering the customer’s implicit conditions of satisfaction.
You might be wondering how this relates to being a good customer. Having developed resorts and hotels in years past, I worked with real estate brokers, architects, engineers, landscape architects, and general contractors. Early on, I was frustrated with redesigns, change orders, and other challenges that led to increased costs. While studying Flores’ work, I met an MIT professor who has a great saying; “whenever I have a problem I’m around.” I asked myself what role was I playing in this workflow that was leaving me dissatisfied and frustrated? It struck me that I was assuming that the service providers knew my implicit conditions of satisfaction.
When I defined and communicated my implicit conditions of satisfaction, the provider’s quality and speed of work dramatically increased. This experience led me to begin asking my own teams to remember to view the customer experience from the customer’s perspective – what our customers experienced as they interacted with us. We started mapping our customer experience, literally from when the they entered the parking lot until they departed the parking lot. I shared this also with our providers. This was just the beginning. I began sharing not just vision and mission statements, but the process that led to them. I also shared our operating and service standards and the “whys” behind them. For all parties, having much more context led to a deeper understanding of what we were trying to achieve.
My efforts at being a good customer led to increased collaboration and reduced costs. And they were invested in the customer service experience leading to innovations that might not have been discovered. Another outcome was the friendships that were created and the appreciation from these important service providers about their role in not just creating a facility. There were creating a customer service experience that would create long lasting experiences with our business.
All of this reminds me of the old parable about the gentlemen who asked some construction workers what they were doing. Many described their work: carpentry, brick laying, plumbing, etc. He noticed a worker seeming to be keeping the site clean. When he was asked what he was doing, he replied that he was part of a team building a church where locals could gather, worship, and support each other. There is so much value in everyone seeing the bigger, broader picture.
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