The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Conflicting Views on Customer Service

12 August, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

A recent survey by the HBR suggests that exceeding customer’s expectation (delighting them to coin a phrase) won’t get you more customers.  But not giving them what they want will cause them to walk.

Seth Godin on the other hand maintains that:

“recovering from failure is such a great opportunity. If you or your organization fail and then you pull out all the stops to recover or make good, the expectation/delivery gap is huge. You don’t win because you did a good job, you win because you so dramatically exceeded expectations.”

So you have two choices:

1.  Deliberately mess up and then fix the mess.
2.  Don’t mess up in the first place.

Which is it going to be?

Personally I would go for option 2 (with 1 as a backstop)

Image by Alan

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: service recovery

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

www.squawkpoint.com/

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Circles of Influence: Do You Want Your Team Flexing Their’s?

  • Should You Punish Mistakes?

  • Why Would You Want to Work for Google?

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in