Satisfied people pay you for what you have done - they are called customers.

Really happy people pay you, come back for more and advertise you to their friends - for a small business they are called the difference between going bust and paying the bills in six months.

Ask most companies if they would like to satisfy their customers and they would reply yes - it seems so obvious an answer as to be a stupid question…

However, I argue that satisfying your customers is merely a slower death than actively dissatisfying them.

Consider the satisfaction of your customer on a scale, say 1-10. Now, 0 is obviously deeply unsatisfied, and 10 really delighted. So where is satisfaction? I would argue that satisfaction is at the mid point between delight and disappointment.

As an interesting aside if you asked the same people that we started with whether they would be happy with an average customer satisfaction score of 5/10 I would guess that most would say no.

Anyhow, now look at the diagram again and consider what levels give rise to customers talking about a company. I consider that only the extremes generate free advertising, the more extreme the greater the spread of communication.

For example, I will tell anyone who will listen about my long trail of woe with NTL and (partly as a as a result) none of our friends use NTLs services.

Conversely Smile transferred all of my many direct debits etc from my old bank to theirs with no input from me in short order and without a single error. A bank with no hassle? Of course, I was delighted and again my friends get to hear about it.

The thing is that mere satisfaction doesn't get you anything as a company, it is simply the transaction that didn't go wrong. Satisfaction is generated from hygiene factors LINK LINK LINK in that it is only generated when the basic requirements are met adequately. As with hygiene factors meeting these requirements, even perfectly, generates only satisfaction. To create delight, or motivation, you need to act on the ability to add unexpected additional value to the customer.

Consider how you might reliably produce delight in another person. Stumped? That's because delight is about human connection, responding to someone else as a unique being with their own individual desires and needs, not the fulfilment of a transaction or contract. So what will work as an employer are practices which encourage and enable the employee to be human at work and thus to respond to people from this place. Encourage and reward automatons and that is the quality of service that will be provided.



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