Get inside your customer’s
head
s many of you know,
I was a psychology major, with a minor in creative writing,
when I took a 31-year detour to become a drycleaning business
owner. I’ve never lost my curiosity for what makes people
“tick,” particularly customers. I’ve always
enjoyed experimenting with what actions I could take, as a
business owner, and seeing what reactions I’d get from
customers.
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In any service encounter — from a
simple pizza pickup to a complex, long-term consulting
engagement — perception is reality. That is, what really
matters is how the customer interprets the encounter.
Behavioral science can shed light on the complex processes
involved in the formation of those perceptions.
In particular, it can help managers
understand how people react to the sequence and duration of
events, and how customers rationalize experiences after they
occur.
First, their research tells us a lot about
how customers experience the passage of time: when time seems
to drag, when it speeds by, and when in a sequence of events an
uncomfortable experience will be least noticed.
Second, it helps us understand how
customers interpret an event after it’s over. For
example, people seem to be hardwired to blame an individual
rather than a poorly designed system when something goes wrong.
Sequence effects
According to psychologists, when people
recall an experience, they don’t remember every single
moment of it. Instead, they recall a few significant moments
vividly and gloss over the others. They remember snapshots, not
movies. And they carry away an overall assessment of the
experience that’s based on three factors: the trend in
the sequence of pain or pleasure, the high and low points, and
the ending.
Not surprisingly, people prefer a sequence
of experiences that improve over time. When gambling, they
prefer to lose $10 first, then win $5, rather than win $5, then
lose $10. Even though the net result is the same. People pay
attention to the rate of improvement in a sequence —
clearly preferring ones that improve faster.
Herein lies the justification for prompt
problem resolution. If a customer has a problem, solving it
quickly is the best course of action. And, most intriguing, the
ending matters most. A terrible ending usually dominates a
person’s recollection of an experience.
For instance, it was learned that
prolonging a colonoscopy by leaving the colonoscope in place
for about a minute after the procedure was completed, thus
decreasing the level of discomfort for the final moments of the
procedure, produced significant improvements in patients’
perception of the experience.
OK, probably only a small number of
customers would equate going to the cleaners with having a
colonoscopy, but there’s a lesson here: don’t push
your customers down the assembly line, as often happens at the
supermarket, where they plop all of your change, and the
receipt, in your hand and begin pushing you down the line (out
the door) before you’ve had a chance to even put your
money away. Always end with a “Thank you, Mrs. Jones. See
you next time.”
Duration effects
Psychologists have always been interested
in how people process time. When do they pay attention to the
passage of time, and how do they estimate its duration?
One factor is the color in your call
office. Cool colors such as white and pastels tend to
make people underestimate the amount of time spent in your store. While
warm colors such as burgundy and brown cause people to overestimate the
time they spend dropping off and picking up their cleaning.
Research indicates that unless an activity
is much longer or much shorter then expected, people pay little
attention to its duration. The pleasurable content of the
experience and how it is arranged, rather than how long it
takes, seems to be more important.
Several useful principles for
service-encounter management emerged from these findings.
1. Finish strong. Most service providers believe that the
beginning and end of an encounter — the service bookends
— are equally weighted in the eyes of the customer.
They’re wrong. The end is far more
important because it’s what remains in the
customer’s memory. Sure, it’s important to achieve
a base level of satisfactory performance at the beginning, but
a company is better off with a relatively weak start and a
modest upswing at the end than with a strong start and a so-so
ending.
Helping customers to their cars with large
orders, or making sure they don’t forget their cleaning
order after payment is made, can be more important than the
greeting they’re given on arrival. As it turns out in
business, last impressions — not first impressions
— endure.
2. Get the bad experiences out of the way
early. In any service
encounter, people prefer to have undesirable events come first
— so they can avoid dread — and to have desirable
events come at the end of a sequence –— so they can
savor them.
For instance, if a garment is damaged in
processing, rather than wait for the customer to come in,
expecting to pick-up a wearable garment, call the customer
immediately, explain the situation and offer an acceptable
resolution. Most people want bad news brought to their
attention right away. Unfortunately, many of us dread
delivering bad news to the point of delaying it until the last
possible moment. This is exactly the wrong thing to do.
3. Build commitment through choice. An interesting study found that blood
donors perceived significantly less discomfort when they were
allowed to select the arm from which the blood would be drawn.
Most hotels give customers a choice of using an alarm clock or
receiving a wake-up call. Some banks have moved away from snake
line configurations and back to individual lines so that
customers can work with their favorite teller.
The lesson: people are happier and more
comfortable when they believe they have some control over a
process.
Give your customers the choices they
desire. Everyone doesn’t have to fit into the same mold.
Your customers will love you for it.
4. Give customers rituals, and stick to
them. Loyal customers find
comfort in repetitive, familiar activities. They like the fact
that your counter personnel always handle their incoming and
outgoing order in the same way. Develop a good system and stick
with it. Have new employees learn your system to give customers
that warm and fuzzy feeling.
5. The right remedy. How do you make up for a service-encounter
error? Research on what customers perceive as a fair remedy
suggests that the answer depends on whether it is an outcome
error or a process error. A botched task calls for material
compensation, while poor treatment from a server calls for an
apology. Reversing these recovery actions is unlikely to be
effective.
Imagine being a copy store manager faced
with two complaining customers. One says that the job was done
right but the clerk was surly. The other says that the clerk
was pleasant but when he got home, he realized that his report
was missing two pages, and he had to take it to a competitor
near his house to get the job done right. What should you do?
In the case of the rude clerk, don’t
give the customer some tangible compensation, such as a coupon
for his next visit. All the customer really wants is a sincere
apology from the clerk and the manager.
In the case of the botched job, you can
apologize all over the place, but that won’t satisfy the
customer. He wants the job done right, and he wants some
compensation for his inconvenience.
So while apologies are appropriate in both
situations, research indicates that process-based remedies
should be applied to process-based problems and outcome-based
remedies should be applied to outcome-based problems.
Ultimately only one thing really matters
in a service encounter — the customer’s perception
of what occurred. We need to focus more on the factors
affecting those perceptions. Service encounters can be
engineered to enhance the customer’s experience while
it’s happening, and their recollection after it is
completed.
Put yourself in your customers’
shoes and imagine their journey. Visualize every moment they
spend with your employees and in your store. Where should you
offer choices to the customer? What are the last images of your
service that customers will remember, and how can you enhance
them?
Dennis McCrory is president of The Golomb
Group Inc., a firm that designs marketing programs for
drycleaners. Contact him at The Golomb Group Inc., 7664 Plaza
Ct., Willowbrook, IL 60527 Tele: (800) 679-5856
E-mail: dennismccrory@golombgroup.com
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