As a management consultant specializing in quality and continuous improvement, I see opportunities everywhere to improve customer satisfaction.   Most of them don’t require significant resources or efforts.  Despite the rhetoric about being customer-focused, most businesses fail to see and act upon such opportunities.  

Here is an example from my personal experience.

On a Sunday evening in March this year, I flew from Raleigh/Durham to Phoenix to speak at the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Lean & Six Sigma Conference.  Upon arrival at the airport, I went to the rental car center to pick up my reserved car.  Since it was my first time visiting Phoenix, it took me a while before finding the rental company in a giant parking deck. There was a single service agent, who was sitting comfortably inside a booth.  

He finished the paperwork and pointed to the direction in the garage where I could find my car.  It was a good few minutes of walking carrying my bags before I found it.  Throwing my bags in the car and sitting down, the first thing I noticed was a large horizontal crack across the windshield!  Wait, how could anyone have missed it! Pulling out my bags and walking all the way back to the service booth, I complained to the service agent.  He didn’t seem surprised or even care – he simply gave me the paperwork for another car and pointing to me where it was. 

I walked back to a sea of vehicles and found the replacement, a hatchback.  It had a large board (some interior part of the vehicle) sitting across in the back where the luggage goes.  The backseats were folded down forward.  Was the car just returned by someone and was it prepared for new customers?

I sat down and immediately smelled cigarette smoke in the car.  It was supposed to be a smoke-free vehicle.  I am highly sensitive to cigarette smell, which gives me headache. But it was late (past 10pm where I live), after 5 hours of sitting in the airplane, I hadn’t had dinner, it was a good distance to the conference hotel, and I had a presentation first thing in the morning.  I didn’t want to go back asking for another car – what was the chance that I would get a better one?  I was hoping (a big mistake!) that the smell would go away after a while.  But it didn’t, even after full blowing fans and open windows.  

Before exiting the garage, I noticed that the rental agreement listed the current mileage as 4858 whereas the odometer showed 48588.  It shouldn’t matter as the rental came with unlimited miles.  But I mentioned it to the lady at the exit gate anyway when she checked my paperwork.  She couldn’t care less.

When I returned the car a few days later, I told the agent about the smoke and the need to get the car cleaned and ready before renting to customers, he told me that the car was clean.  Really?  I didn’t hear a sorry or any apologies. 

He then gave me a wrong receipt — $20 more than what I reserved for.  It was good that I checked it.  I told him it was wrong.  He then blamed me for not returning with the tank full when in fact he looked at the gauge already, which showed full. I topped off the tank before I returned the car and had the receipt to prove it.  Luckily, I was prepared and brought a copy of my reservation showing the correct full price.   He finally produced a correct receipt.

What’s comical about this experience was that the day after returning home, I received an email message from the rental car company with “We Value Your Opinion!” in the subject line.  

I am familiar with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and a long-time fan of Frederick Reichheld and his books The Loyalty Effect, Loyalty Rules, and The Ultimate Question.  I knew what it meant when asked “how likely are you to recommend [a business] to a friend or colleague?”  So I promptly filled out the survey.   In the survey, it asked me what they could do to make me rate them a 10.  Here was my response.

Do not worry about getting a 10 when you deserve a zero.  Do the basics to get back to 6, 7, or 8 by giving customers a clean vehicle and a correct receipt, right the first time.  Train your people to care about their jobs and do them competently.  Treat customers with respect and appreciation.  Know that the most profitable customer segments have the most options when it comes to renting a car.

Businesses need to learn the right way to understand customers and improve their satisfaction. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the NPS has been seriously misused and abused by many businesses, who don’t understand that it is not the score, but the quality of the products and services, that matters.  Customers don’t care about the number. 

Stop asking customers for their feedback if you cannot meet their basic, obvious requirements.

Customers give us plenty of feedback through their normal interactions with the business.  A survey may complement our knowledge about customer satisfaction but cannot replace proactive learning and improvement by every employee every day.

So if you want to improve quality and customer satisfaction, first things first — go back to the basics and get them right. 

ProtoArray was the world’s first commercially available high-density human protein microarray when it was launched in 2004.  While I wish it would continue, I am gratified to see how much ProtoArray products and services have helped researchers advance science and medicine in the past 14 years.

The news brought back a lot of memories.  As a scientist I joined the start-up company, Protometrix, in an empty 19th-century factory building in Guilford, CT in September 2001.  Protometrix was acquired by Invitrogen in April 2004, and we launched the ProtoArray product four times within the first year of the acquisition.  I led the design, manufacturing, and application development of the product and learned many lessons from the experience.

The most important lesson is “understand the customer.”  As technology-based first-in-class product developers, we tend to focus on overcoming technical challenges and let R&D drive the development.   As a scientist and engineer, I could not help but be passionate about the technology.  But it is a common mistake that I still see among some life science companies.   There is a lot of uncertainty in the commercial value of the product because it is new, unproven.  If few customers have used it or would know what performance attributes are important to them, how do we make design trade-offs? 

A better way is to involve our commercial colleagues and customers as early and frequently as possible.  The goal should be commercial proof-of-concept, e.g. is there at least one paying customer?  If we did not have a paying customer in the unfavorable capital market of 2004, I think Protometrix would have a hard time finding a buyer. 

It was on the New Product Introduction teams when I was first exposed to the Agile product development concept back in 2004.  But it was the experience of launching the product 4 times in a year with progressively more features (i.e. proteins), refined designs, added software and services that helped me appreciate the value of understanding the customers and the mechanisms required to operationalize it.

Many organizations now embrace various Agile frameworks to accelerate product development.  They should be aware that these and other similar frameworks are off-the-shelf solutions to overcome structural barriers that slow us down in understanding customers.  Implementing such frameworks is neither necessary nor sufficient for innovators.  What is necessary is the unwavering focus on improving our understanding of the customer needs in the context of their business or life.  Under competent management, the right structure for the innovator, whatever it is, will emerge eventually and continue to evolve with the customers.

I will continue my journey on understanding the customers in the new year.  I hope you join me.