22. The Law of Customer Satisfaction

The Laws of Business Success

Under the Laws of Business

The customer is always right.

This is also called "rule number one" of customer satisfaction. We live in a customer-centered market economy. Never has the customer had so much information and so much power. Every company, large and small, must be thinking day and night about how to please customers faster, better, and cheaper than the competition.

The first corollary of the Law of Customer Satisfaction is
If ever the customer seems to be wrong, refer back to rule number one.

The very best companies in America, and worldwide, are built on this philosophy. They have an obsession with customer service. They are continually looking for ways to please their customers better than any of their competitors and better than even they themselves were pleasing their customers before. In every industry, the most successful companies are those for whom the customer is king or queen and customer satisfaction is the driving force of all their activities.

The second corollary of the Law of Customer Satisfaction is
All customer satisfaction comes from people dealing with other people.

You cannot satisfy people with goods or paper of any kind. People are emotional, and they can be satisfied only as the result of their interactions with other people. According to a Harvard study, fully 68 percent of dissatisfied customers who changed suppliers did so because of the indifference of one or more people in the company. This is why the most successful companies have very clear customer satisfaction policies, usually in writing. Everyone in those organizations is committed to treating customers well.

For example, the Walt Disney Corporation hires thousands of college students to work at the Disney theme parks in the summertime. These students are hired in the middle of May and trained for four to six weeks in their functions. They then work for approximately eight weeks of the summer season when children are out of school and the theme parks are the busiest.

When the Disney people are asked why it is that the students receive such rigorous training, lasting four to six weeks, to then work for only eight weeks before going back to school, their reply reveals a lot about the Disney philosophy. Disney executives explain that the students are drilled in their jobs to the point where they can do them without thinking. This allows them to concentrate their attention on the visitors, or "guests," as they are called. Because the students have memorized their jobs completely, they are more conscious of the small things they can do to make people happy that they have chosen to come to a Disney amusement park.

The third corollary of the Law of Customer Satisfaction is
The best companies invariably have the best people.

The best companies learned a long time ago that the people they select will largely determine their success. They therefore take a long time to hire people and are very careful in both interviewing and in checking references. Once a person has been hired, if that hiree is the wrong person, he or she can cause a great deal of harm before being let go.

Your ability to attract and keep good people is vital to your long-term success as an executive. Fortunately, you can learn how to interview and hire well. This is a key skill for success in business.

The fourth corollary of the Law of Customer Satisfaction is
The key role of management is to achieve the maximum return on investment in human resources
toward satisfying customers.

You have two choices with any job. You can either do the job yourself or you can get someone else to do it. As a manager, your job is to get things done through others rather than doing them yourself.

One final observation on customer satisfaction: The employees of a company will always treat the customers the way the management treats the employees. Whenever you are treated especially well by people in any store or restaurant, you know that that place has a good manager who treats the staff well. Whenever you are treated poorly, for any reason, you know that the person you are dealing with is probably treating you this way in an attempt to get back at a manager who she feels is treating her badly.

How you can apply this law immediately:

1. Resolve today to give your customers the very highest quality and quantity of service in the industry. Never be satisfied with second best.

2. Determine where you and your company rank based on the four levels of customer satisfaction described below. Develop a plan of action to move toward the highest levels.

Here are the four levels of customer satisfaction. The first, the bare minimum for survival, is meeting customer expectations. What are the basic expectations of your customers, and how could you meet them with greater consistency?

The second level of customer satisfaction is where you exceed customer expectations. What additional service features could you create that would go beyond what your competitors are doing?

The third level is where you delight your customers. What could you do that would pleasantly surprise your customers, something completely beyond their expectations?

Finally, the fourth level of customer satisfaction, reached only by the most successful and respected organizations, is where you amaze your customers. This is where you are so good at going beyond anything they would expect that not only do they buy from you again and again, but they tell their friends to buy from you as well. In what ways could you design your customer relation policies so that you amaze your customers?

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).