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 only extremely...
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...
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...
Price unfairness and customer satisfaction
Drawing on previous research which proved the effect of price unfairness perceptions on customer dissatisfaction, Xia, Monroe and Cox (2004) suggest that price fairness perceptions influence assessments of product value and customer satisfaction. They classify the antecedents of price unfairness perception into four groups: the variables that specify the context of the comparative transactions, information that provides reasons why a...
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...
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...
Satisfaction and Loyalty: the missing link
More often than not loyalty is presented as a by-product of satisfaction and a direct consequence of it. Unfortunately loyalty has many more antecedents and some of them moderate the impact of satisfaction. A piece of evidence is given by researchers in the latest isue of the Journal of Marketing. Their idea was to understand why satisfaction has sometimes no influence on repurchase and under which conditions it happens. Drawing on...
Belgian national railways‘ satisfaction survey: 2 lessons learned
Monopolies are seldom subject to satisfaction surveys. However the market is about to open and the Belgian railways have been hit by a few scandals (among them security infringements and casualties) which have probably motivated the management to ask an agency to conduct a survey. I filled the satisfaction survey in and noticed some mistakes. Let’s use this example to avoid the same mistakes the next time you want to survey your...
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...
Is Accor really focused on satisfaction ?
I recently saw an advertisement of Accor Hotels claiming that they were really taking care of customer satisfaction. Actually they even wanted to go a step further proposed Nordstrom-like guarantee: “satisfaction guaranteed or your next night free”. I’m not sure how this guarantee works but at least I like the motto. This kind of guarantee is also pretty unusual in the hospitality industry and therefore deserves a mention. But is this...
When your customers retaliate … here’s what happened to United Airlines
There are two kinds of companies: those which listen to customers and those which don’t. The most difficult part of it, when you’re listening, is to listen to your unsatisfied customers too. It’s kind of difficult to listen to critics and to accept them respectfully and sincerely. One company that apparently hasn’t really got this is United Airlines. The story below has received important media coverage in North America but little in...
The dark side of cocreation
During the EMAC2010 Johannes Gebauer (Innsbruck University, Austria) presented an interesting and quite unusual topic. Under the title « the dark side of co-creation » Johannes presented the results of a research carried out on the Spar business case. For those who don’t know Spar it’s a European group of proximity stores under franchising agreements. I thank Johannes who kindly accepted to put his slides at disposal to make them...
