4 advices to remember when measuring customer satisfaction
The Heathrow airport has installed devices to measure satisfaction after the security checks. Yet, we think did not get customer satisfaction right. The biggest mistake they did was to put the device too far away from the lane, making it out of reach for most customers. Hence only customers with a good reason will find the motivation (or need) to walk the extra steps to the device to give an input. As a result you see...
1855.com : how long can they survive?
Life is sometimes hard, especially for losers. Within a few days I read two different articles about 1855.com. The first one was published in the magazine “la Revue du Vin de France” which is a magazine specialized in wine and wine making. The other one was published in Le Figaro, a few years ago. I must admit 1855.com did very well in getting outstanding press coverage. They went to the stock market, and purchased two other...
How to manage customers’ expectations
Customer satisfaction depends, in part, on the gap between a customer’s expectations and the actual performance. A good tactics, seldom used, to increase satisfaction is to shape customers’ expectations. The Belgian Post gives us an easy example. The most annoying part of going to the post office is the waiting time. I recently saw a leaflet at my local post office where busy and less busy hours are announced. Knowing that, it’s then up to you...
Aligning customer’s and firm’s perspective on quality
I’m currently re-reading Prof. Oliver’s monograph on consumer’s satisfaction. The chapter on quality reminded me of one striking example. Oliver explains that quality is to be understood differently whether it is approached from the consumer’s perspective or from the firm’s perspective. This may seem obvious but actually it’s not. If quality is considered an antecedent of satisfaction, both perspectives should be the same to be aligned with the marketing concept which emphasizes delivering satisfaction (not just...
Customer satisfaction best practices
This complicated sketch represents the first step of my tentative to sum up the different flows of academic research around customer satisfaction. I started reviewing literature in an attempt to define more precisely which best practices had been defined in order to increase satisfaction and loyalty. Curiously I first found out that there was no real global overview on those best practices (perhaps because it is too practitioner-oriented). I dug deeper and deeper into HR (Service-Profit...
How does Air France – KLM deal with customer’s satisfaction?
After I blogged last week about Accor and the way they deal with satisfaction in their annual report, I thought it might be interesting to do the same exercise for another company. Researches based on the analysis of annual reports have already been published in an attempt to reveal emerging themes (like ethics and ecology) and discrepancies between the official discourse and the reality. It seemed to me valuable to apply the same logic to a more...
