Delivering Quality Service - Managing Gap 1

In my previous post, I talked about Delivering Quality Service. There are four areas where a service provider can make mistakes that increase the gap between customer expectations and perceptions. The first area, or gap, is when the management's perception of customer expectation is wrong. This gap is created when the executive team misjudges customer expectation. Typically, this occurs under the following circumstances:

• There is a lack of market research
• The management team ignores the market research results.
• There is poor communication between field level resources and the senior team
• There are too many layers between the senior management team and the customer.

Many senior executive's work solely on intuition. This can be dangerous. Intuition is often based on anecdotal evidence that risks looking at too small a population to be accurate. One executive told me that he wasn't worried about quality because they hadn't received many complaints. I emailed him a study that showed that only 6% of unsatisfied customers actually complain directly to an organization; 94% simply leave frustrated. This was before social networking sites and online opinion sites became prevalent however the study highlighted that market research was needed to get a complete picture of customer expectations. Market research, as simple as customer surveys or as complex as customer focus groups, ensures you are listening to your customers and that they have a say in defining your quality standards.

Even with market research, management can still be off if they chose to ignore it, or to disbelieve it. I've seen this happen under different circumstances. The first was when an executive was hired away from a larger firm with a similar service offering. He believed he knew enough from working in the space for 20 years to indicate our research was wrong. He missed the fact that customers have different service expectations from a large firm than they do for a startup. Though the expectations were similar, they differed enough that he widened the gap.


Management may also ignore the data altogether if it contradicts their personal beliefs. I once presented a senior exec with some analysis on poor customer satisfaction ratings and the root cause analysis pointed at our value proposition. Customers felt that our price was too high for the quality of the services we provided. The executive believed that our projects were less expensive than others and assumed that the customers were pressuring us for price reductions. Because our services was offered on a Time & Materials basis, when he put more resources on the projects to improve the quality, he also increased the cost to the customer. The affect was ugly and we lost a few customers before we revisited this.

Sometimes management simply doesn't have all the input they need to set the right quality goals for the organization. Poor internal communication can widen the gap between expectation and perception. I was consulting to a firm where the messenger was always shot. Guess what, messages soon stopped flowing. It was hard to believe but the executive team became more and more insulated and over time the organization suffered. Customers were giving their sales reps and field reps input on quality concerns but these never made it back to the senior team.

This can also be caused when the organization has too many layers between the customer and the senior management team. I once had a problem with a desktop application. After using the product for years, I started getting an unrecoverable application exception on startup so I called customer support to log the problem. In order to talk to a live person, I had to pay a fee ($20 or so) but the fee was refundable if the problem was determined to be a product defect, so I paid the fee and talked to a rep. He told me to open the application without any data. When it started, he said that the application was fine but that my data was bad so I would have to pay the fee. After arguing for quite some time that an application crash is a defect, independent of data, he passed me off to a call supervisor, who passed me to the shift supervisor. The next day I called back and talked with their manager, who passed me off to his, who passed me off to the office of the CTO who passed me off to the Quality Lead who then told me that she hated dealing with "software types' because we thought we knew it all, and hung up on me. Incredulous, I searched the web for the name of every executive that I could find at the company. I then tried every permutation of email addresses I could think of and sent them all a blistering complaint. Only one exec ever replied, the VP of Marketing. He told me that management had cracked down on the organization for not charging customers enough for support, and he could now see that the organization had taken this to an unhealthy extreme. With all the layers in management, he had never gotten the feedback that they had gone too far and was not able to guide his company in the right direction. To his credit, he actually sent me a personal check for $20 because he thought it would be too hard to get a reimbursement. Clearly this guy got it, but he had too many layers between himself and his customer to see the problem firsthand.

To avoid pointing the organization in the wrong direction, the senior management team has to do its homework and talk with customers about their quality expectations. Through the use of market research and direct communications, the senior team has to remain close enough to the customer to minimize the gap between what they think the customer wants and what the customer thinks they want.