Change before customers say goodbye
By Budi W. Soetjipto
JAKARTA (JP): Have you ever told someone goodbye, forget it or I don't care anymore?
The experience must have been so bad that you had good cause to say these words.
If you can say them to a person, why not tell a product, either an item or service? Telling a particular product goodbye means you no longer have to spend your money on it.
That is exactly what Puspita Triwulansari did to a taxi company. She had been a loyal customer of a taxi fleet for some time. But when she took cab number 397 from the firm on March 29 this year, she was treated rudely and disrespectfully by the driver, which led to her decision not to use any taxis from the company in the future.
Four days earlier, Novita Fitri Roni and her husband bought a well-known brand of mattress from furniture shop Kiki. It looked fine; however, about two weeks later, as Novita was about to change the sheets, she was surprised to see the mattress was torn in several places.
The couple called the manufacturer to report the problem, and request a replacement or have the mattress fixed. The representative who answered their call showed little sympathy for the problem. He also rejected their request because the tears were beyond the warranty's coverage.
In other words, they were stuck with a defective product probably for the rest of their lives. After such an awful experience, do you think Novita and her husband are going to buy another product of the same brand? Definitely not.
Some companies might not realize that treating customers the way the taxi firm and the mattress manufacturer did could eventually cost them a fortune in lost sales.
AT&T, for instance, reportedly lost millions of dollars recently because its customers switched over to other telephone companies in reaction to the way this U.S. giant took care of their complaints.
Some of the complaints were for the connection and monthly usage minimum charges that customers never signed up for.
When customers filed their complaints, AT&T representatives simply said, "It's the customers' responsibility to tell us (AT&T) about a service they don't want." In other words, the AT&T representatives blamed customers for letting the overcharges to happen. The representatives offered no apologies to customers. Isn't that amazing?
Poor quality
From the aforementioned examples, therefore, it is apparent that the reason why customers do not return to stores or businesses is the poor way the companies delivered or provided the product to consumers, and the poor way the companies handled customers' complaints.
The reason for customers to switch over to the competitor is "poor service quality".
Poor service quality denotes a gap between what customers expect to get and what they actually get.
In other words, poor service quality indicates that the companies did not deliver or provide the product in the way the customers perceived they would, and/or did not handle customers' complaints in the way customers perceived the companies would handle them.
According to Zeithaml and her colleagues, a customer's perception of what companies are supposed to do is affected by his or her experience in doing business with other relevant companies, word of mouth, a customer's personal preferences and/or companies' promises communicated through promotion and advertising (external communications).
External communications are particularly important because they are the fundamentals of a company's image.
Image is not only related to the customers' perceptions and expectations, and, hence, a company's service quality, but also is related to a customer's trust for the company.
Image that is not translated into day-to-day business practices will lead customers to perceive the companies as having poor service quality, as well as make customers lose trust in the companies.
As you may know, once a customer's trust is gone, it is very hard to get it back.
Customers develop perceptions and expectations, and judge a company's service quality based on certain criteria.
In a study involving 800 customers of four well-known U.S. companies, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) identified these criteria:
1. reliability, which is the ability to accurately perform the promised service in a dependable manner;
2. tangibles, which represent the appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel and communication materials;
3. responsiveness, which indicates the willingness to help customers and provide timely service;
4. assurance, which refers to the knowledge and kindness of employees, and their ability to convey trust and confidence; and
5. empathy, which depicts the caring and individualized attention to customers.
Berry (1995) argued that among the above criteria, reliability was the most important one.
His argument is understandable considering that reliability determines the extent to which the companies can maintain their image and, thus, customers' trust.
Besides, Berry's argument was supported by a survey conducted by Illinois Power to identify and rank the factors its 400 largest customers had in mind concerning service quality.
Crucial
Gordon Spainhower, the company's director of marketing, noted the results of the survey, "Reliability of service stands above the others as the single most important factor. It is about twice as important as any factor in the second tier of factors."
However, companies must realize that providing what customers want in terms of the five criteria might not be sufficient to prevent them from switching over to the competitor.
The reason: companies performing as customers expect them to does not give them a competitive advantage over competitors. Customers might easily be lured away by competitors that offer better services.
Therefore, it is strongly suggested that the companies to perform what Berry calls "great service quality," which in essence is to consistently perform services beyond a customer's expectation.
The goal of performing great service quality is to impress customers. Impressive services can carve a niche in a customer's memory.
The question now is how can a company perform such services. Let me tell you about my personal experience eating at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in my neighborhood of Westlake, Ohio.
When you enter this restaurant, nothing seems out of the ordinary: the furniture and decorations are the franchise's standard. The same goes for its menu selection and taste and quality of food.
What makes this restaurant special is the way the employees serve their customers. The staff never lets a customer wait no longer than five minutes usually, but that depends on what they ordered.
If, for some reason, customers have to wait longer than usual, the staff are happy to hand out free drinks and/or appetizers until their meal is served.
Referring back to the five criteria for service quality, that particular restaurant not only provides a dependable service, but also demonstrates astonishing responsiveness, assurance and empathy, which are manifested in the free drinks and appetizers for waiting customers.
'Wow"
This is what great service quality is all about, the kind of services that make a customer say "wow".
My next experience was when I took my family on vacation to Minneapolis, Minnesota. At that time, we stayed in Country Inns and Suites in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. The hotel was pleasant and the room was neat.
But during our stay, my daughter Nina lost her "doggie" doll when we were sightseeing.
I reported the incident to the manager on duty. She quickly responded by going to her home to get one of her dolls to lend to Nina.
Next morning, we received some money to buy another one. The doll the manager lent to Nina was hers to keep. I was impressed by what the Country Inns and Suites' manager did for us. It exemplified the company's responsiveness, assurance and empathy to its customers. In my opinion, this hotel's service quality was clearly way above customers' expectations.
Some of you, however, might say that the services provided in the restaurant and hotel are nothing new.
You could be right, but you have to remember that delivering great service quality is not about providing a new, or even sophisticated, service.
It is about providing the service beyond and above customers' expectations. Hence, it does not matter to customers whether the service is old or new, simple or sophisticated. As long as the service exceeds their expectations, the companies should go ahead and do it.
The writer is a lecturer at the Department of Management, University of Indonesia, and a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at Cleveland State University, U.S.A.