Customer Expectation vs. Organisational Delivery
The single biggest failing in business today is the inability for organizations to deliver on client expectations. Many organizations run customer satisfaction indices which measure how “satisfied” the client has been with the organization. Ringing throughout is the desire for good news, with very little if any questions asked about how we can improve our service to you.Measuring the client satisfaction is no longer the measure that is good enough in terms of the client experience with the organization. The learned community out there will say “you are talking about CRM”, we as the consumer encounter many attempts in this arena on a daily basis.
I, along with many consumers out there, can give many examples of service delivery issues, issues around quality and the inevitable question “please rate our experience”.
When we do bother to take part, and I can assure you that many people do not, the questions guide us toward the inevitable answer that we are satisfied. If we try to venture outside of the questionnaire, we are told “I am sorry but that is not part of the questionnaire”!
An example: I was called by Renault (or at least their outsourced call centre) to enquire if I, “as a valued client” was satisfied with the recent service on my vehicle. The problem the lady one the phone encountered is that she did not have any detail as to the problems I had experienced. So when I proceeded to tell her that I was called (after the car had been booked in a month previous) at 3:30pm on the afternoon of the delivery to advise that the parts had not arrived from Johannesburg. The consultant though assured me that they would valet the car – great a clean car that is not working!! Super I can do a lot with that – well I could look at it I suppose and admire how clean it is!!
The woman then proceeded to check how happy I was with the service from the service assistant. I was happy with his service, he had done his best and I think was left out to dry in terms of the back office. She concluded her remarks by saying thank you for taking part in the customer satisfaction process and thanked me for my valuable feedback.
When I asked her if my comments had been noted she said that she would raise it with the relevant parties but that “no they would not form part of the questionnaire”. An outsider reading the form would conclude that I was happy with the customer service. In reality the communication was okay but the delivery in terms of what I expected was appalling – this fact is nowhere on the form. I am sure that Renault pays mega amounts of cash to get this feedback, but they are not getting it. They are as much to blame given that they are not requesting their call centre agents to gather the information. Maybe they do not want it?
Increasingly we find that we are viewed as “valuable clients”, but our comments are not heard. I suppose what I am ultimately getting at is, that in this time of “not so plenty” we as consumers need to extract the maximum value out of our hard earned cash. We must not settle for products that do not meet our expectation, read the fine print and hold the suppliers to account.
Here ends the rant..
