Opinions Good Thinking What Are Customers Thinking?
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By John Canfield
Management Consultant
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Wouldn’t it be great to know what your customers are thinking when they consider, use and evaluate your products and services? This month I review two helpful brainstorming formats that help teams consider, organize and act on information about customers: The Kano Model and Moments of Truth.
The Kano model can be used as a brainstorming format to help a team identify customer expectations, wants and pleasant surprises. The purpose of the tool is to differentiate product and service offerings. If it is done well, it requires benchmarking and research to support the tool’s brainstorming with data, not just opinions.
Process: The original Kano Model will look like a graph with four quadrants with a diagonal line running from lower left to upper right. This diagonal line emphasizes that the expectations of customers improve over time. Below the line represents basic attributes. The diagonal line represents performance attributes. The area above the line represents excitement attributes.
Basic Attributes are unspoken, but expected. An example would be any new car buyer expects there to be a spare tire in the trunk. That it’s there is no big deal. If it was found missing, especially on a desolate road with a flat tire in the rain, it becomes a very big deal.
Performance Attributes are those for which more is generally better and will improve customer satisfaction. An example would be the gas mileage the car can get. Many car buyers are selecting cars based on their mileage. Automakers say, “Our car’s mileage is as good or better than our competitor’s.”
Excitement Attributes are unspoken and unexpected by customers, but can result in high levels of customer satisfaction. However their absence does not lead to dissatisfaction. Excitement attributes often satisfy latent needs—real needs of which customers are currently unaware. Honda did this years ago with a ball bearing-supported ash tray. Because it was “very smooth,” people thought of the company’s cars as high-precision vehicles. In New Orleans, this is called lagniappe, pronounced “lan-yap,” which means a little bit extra—such as a baker’s dozen, 13, one extra, free!
You can also use a simple format. On a flip chart, draw lines to create three columns with the following titles: basic attributes, performance attributes and excitement attributes. Then have the contributing team brainstorm, discuss and place their data in the three columns, one column at a time. Use lots of discussion and lots of data presentation. This will lead to lots of learning.
The overall goal of the exercise is to help the team confirm they are quietly fulfilling the customers’ basic attributes, advertising and attracting customers to the performance attributes. Finally, with both the basic and performance attributes fulfilled, they are then providing something to the customer that pleasantly surprises them, encouraging them to select your product or service.
Moments of Truth is a brainstorming format that can help a team identify customer expectations as they experience your products and services. The purpose of the tool is provide a format to think about, document and improve how an organization supports customers.
Process:
To the purpose of robust dialogue, to find the truth, people should challenge any possible inaccurate assumptions. Try when possible to back up the statements in and under the process steps with data, not just opinions or hopes. The notion of “moments of truth” comes from Richard Normann, who argues that a service company's overall performance is the sum of countless interactions between customers and employees that either helps to retain a customer or sends him to the competition.
The idea was later used by Jan Carlzon when he was CEO of Scandinavian Airlines back in 1986. He said, “That spark and the emotionally driven behavior that creates it explain how great customer service companies earn trust and loyalty during ‘moments of truth’—those few interactions (for instance, a lost credit card, a canceled flight, a damaged piece of clothing or investment advice) when customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome. Superb handling of these moments requires an instinctive frontline response that puts the customer's emotional needs ahead of the company's and the employee's agendas.” This tool can help a team build a deep shared understanding of how the customer is experiencing a company’s products and services.