Customer appeasement versus customer satisfaction

Early in my career, when I was a customer service manager, I interviewed for a job where I was given a hypothetical problem to resolve.  It was one of those questions where there is no right answer; rather the interviewer is simply trying to test your lateral thinking skills.  The hypothesis was that the customer had experienced terrible service and wanted the problem resolved immediately.  After running through a number of potential solutions, including involving my manager, escalating up the tree etc., all of which were ruled out by the interviewer, I eventually suggested I would go back to the customer and explain that regrettably what they wanted was not possible and proceeded to offer what I thought would be attainable.


Whilst I was shortlisted for the position I was ultimately unsuccessful.  The feedback I received was they did not like my willingness to go back to the customer and push back.  Now maybe, because of my role as a Customer Service Manager, I was used to dealing with this kind of situation in a certain manner. Part of my required skill set was learning how to deal with customers whose appetite typically surpassed the limited solutions we had at our disposal and managing their expectations.  Since that point I have always been fascinated when I see experienced managers blinded by the mantra that "the customer is always right" and seem limited in their ability to achieve customer satisfaction through any other route than customer appeasement.  And anyone who is not willing to see things their way is simply not customer focused.

So let's start with some simple base-lining.  No one is in business just to have happy customers.  Let me re-state that, no one who just wants happy customers is in business for long.  Most people are in business to make a return for their shareholders, whether that be themselves or their investors.  But the conventional wisdom, with which I agree, is that happy customers are better for your business than unhappy ones.  Happier customers are more likely to remain so and possibly even buy more.  But even from this statement you can start to see where the premise begins to depreciate.  Happy customers are not guaranteed to stay and they are certainly not guaranteed to buy more… just more likely.  This law of probability is further diluted when you start comparing happy with very happy. Meaning that even if you spent every penny of the company’s money to make every last customer "delighted" there is still no guarantee any or all of them will stay.  In conclusion, and a most unpopular truism, happiness needs to be measured in terms of ROI.

So what makes a customer happy?  Again there is a paper industry around this subject but for me the answer is simple – by consistently exceeding their expectations. 

And so this brings me full circle.  Step one to exceeding expectations is to set expectations.   It is the old cliché “always under promise and over deliver”.   It is the art of getting a customer to understand what is realistic and probable versus what is aspirational and possible.  It is the skill of delivering bad news early and not hoping that the sun, the moon and the stars will somehow align and the project plan will catch up.  It is having the skill and the courage to explain to a customer what you can do versus what they would like you to do.  In the end, both may achieve the short term goal of making the customer happy, but one is affordable and sustainable whereas the other is likely not - and only one will lead to long term satisfaction.

It is about being skilled enough to sell reality and then deliver against it versus telling the customer what they want to hear regardless of whether it is attainable.  Appeasing the customer for the short term is ultimately unsatisfying for all.