Satisfied customers and the promises they keep (or don’t)

When it comes to keeping promises the weight of the discussion mostly falls on the organisation, but what about the other half of the equation – the promises a customer makes?

Satisfied customers and the promises they keep (or don’t).

I was at a conference last Friday and a couple of things jumped up and begged me to comment on them. And once I had a chance to think about them an odd kind of intersection began to emerge.

The first instance was from a speaker giving the advertising world view of brand to the audience, pretty much par for the course. And then he made the following statement (could be paraphrasing a bit here as I didn’t write it down word for word) “having satisfied customers is a waste of time…”.

I think he was trying to say that you shouldn’t settle for just satisfied customers, that you should go beyond that and shoot for “delighted customers” because they become your fans and tell their friends and do your marketing for you and and and…

Unfortunately it didn’t come across that way. And here’s the really important bit that got lost in the rush to “delighted.”

You can’t get to delighted customers without first having satisfied customers. I’ll repeat that because it is really, really important. You can’t get to delighted customers without first having satisfied customers.

If you aren’t doing the basics of keeping your promises, consistently and across your whole business, there is no hope of delighting them. And let’s face it, for 95% of customers out there, just having a business keep the promises they make would be pretty damn delightful – forget anything extra, just getting the basics right on any regular basis seems to be beyond most!

And that’s what is so dangerous about this whole delight mythology. If you are hitting the basics out of the ball park every time, then by all means do a bit extra here and there. But to shoot for “above and beyond” as the standard is just not a realistic goal for most organisations. And as noted in the Harvard Business School article “Stop trying to delight your customers”, it just doesn’t deliver the return on investment to make it a worthwhile pursuit.

The second instance that caught my ire was from another speaker relaying an experience with her telecommunications provider. After an international trip she found herself with a big “dongle” bill because they hadn’t alerted her to the fact she had exceeded her limit, something she felt they had a “moral imperative” to do. Annoyed that they wouldn’t overturn the charges she took to Facebook to vent her spleen.

Now I am no fan of the obscure and mostly unintelligible contracts given to customers by telecommunications and other organisations. And many customers have legitimate frustrations and issues with their charges and the way they are treated.

In this case there didn’t seem to be an issue with not understanding the charges or that they had been incorrectly applied, just that the speaker didn’t want to pay them and used social media to force the company to capitulate.

This got me thinking. In the whole promises discussion, a point seems to be getting lost. The customer isn’t always right and they also make promises that they should keep.

When a customer signs a contract, makes a purchase of any kind, submits a request for a quote, signs up for a subscription, buys a trial – they are making promises to that organisation. And with those promises comes an onus on the customer to know what they are and then keep them.

Now before people start throwing rotten tomatoes at me for defending telcos, there is a rider to this. Right now the promises the customers are committing to aren’t always made visible or easy to understand. And that is a huge problem that sets off many very ugly, costly and damaging chains of events – but it doesn’t have to be that way.

So where do the two instances converge?

The only way to have satisfied customers (or delighted customers) is to make sure that the promises you are making and the promises you want the customers to keep are clear and visible and then deliver yours consistently and don’t be afraid to ask your customers to stand by the ones they make.

As a good friend of mine, Peter Tunjic, says – this goes back to the basics of what it means to trade. Which is, after all, the underlying foundation of business. And whether you are a for- profit or other kind of organisation, it is also the underlying foundation of any successful relationship.

See you next week.

PS: Thanks to those who responded to my question last week. The jury is still out and so for the time being [Bob] will be sticking around.

Michel is an independent Brand adviser and advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations make promises they can keep and keep the promises they make, with a strong sustainable brand as the result. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment. You can follow Michel on Twitter @michelhogan