How Customers Decide if They Are Satisfied With Your Service

By: James Delrojo
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[ Posted On: 2007-05-30 ]

I think all businesses these days are aware of the importance of good customer service and most of those businesses work hard to provide it. In order to achieve that goal it is important to understand the psychological process your customers go through when deciding if they are satisfied.

There are four very important mental processes that we each go through when assessing satisfaction. Much of this happens at the subconscious level and so we may not always realize how we are coming to our conclusions, we just feel good dealing with certain businesses and we have a bad feeling about dealing with other businesses.

Let's have a look at those four key processes.

#1. Satisfaction is Measured Against Expectation

It's not necessarily what we experience that leads us to be happy or not it is what we experience compared to what we thought the experience would be like. If our experience is below our expectation then we are unhappy with the experience even if the experience itself is good, on the other hand if it is above expectation we are happy.

This is a very important principle that many businesses fail to understand. If you oversell the benefits of your product or service you may make the sale but you have created an expectation that will be greater than the experience. Your customers will be unhappy. The old motto of undersell and over deliver is still the best policy.

The same goes for your customer service. If you claim to have the greatest customer service in the world then even the slightest imperfection will create a dissatisfied customer. Make sure your customer service always exceeds your promises.

#2. Customers Like Predictability

Customer service that is excellent one day and average the next will lead to dissatisfied customers because once they experience excellence they expect it every time. Far better to be average every day and then you are consistently meeting their expectations.

There are two lessons to learn from this. Firstly, only improve your standards to a level that you can maintain consistently. Secondly, try to keep the quality of your staff consistent. Hiring a brilliant staff member will backfire on you if the others aren't up to scratch because the brilliant one will set the expectation and the others will fall short leading the customer to be unhappy.

#3. The Ease of Dealing With You

Take a mental walk through the whole buying process from your customer's point of view. How easy or difficult is it to deal with your business? Customers are attracted to ease and repelled by difficulty. Until you walk in the customer's shoes you may not realize what your customer is really experiencing.

Look for any ways in which dealing with you is difficult or inconvenient and then find ways to solve those difficulties. Remember that many of your customers may not be like you. They may not like what you like and they may be annoyed with things that don't bother you. Anonymous customer surveys can be very revealing in this regard.

#4. How Important They Are Made To Feel

The more important your customer feels when dealing with your business the more likely they will buy from you again. Casinos understand this principle very well. They treat their high roller customers like royalty. The client becomes addicted to this extreme feeling of importance and they keep coming back again and again.

Many customers will be happy to pay a premium price if they are made to feel important enough. This is the whole principle of first class travel. I did a comparison between first class airfares and economy class for New York to London and found that first class is 9 times the price of economy class. For a trip from L.A. to Sydney the difference was 15 times.

First class seating is more comfortable and you have more space around you but not 9 to 15 times more. The first third of the first class price covers your extra physical comfort and the second two thirds is for the treatment you receive.

Reflect for a moment of these four principles and think about how your business scores. Do you exceed customer expectations, meet them exactly, or fall short? Is the standard of your service consistent or variable? Is it easy to deal with your business or is it difficult? How important do you make your customer feel when they are dealing with your company?

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you his ebook "Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind" (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to www.blog.jamesdelrojo.com

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