Customer Experience Leadership

Chick-fil-A Gets It Right

Chick-fil-A, for those of you who don't know, is a quick-service resaurant chain specializing in, uhm, chicken. Based in Atlanta, they run 1,300 stores in 37 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. It is wildly successful business, racking up 40 consecutive years of sales growth and profiting store operators--who are very carefully chosen, not accepted--handsomely.

I just read a piece on Colloquy.com about Chick-fil-A's third annual "Cow Appreciation Day" (registration required). This is a brilliant piece of branded customer experience marketing. Chick-fil-A has been using a tounge-in-cheek ad campaign theme for several years now featuring cows who encourage us all to "eat mor chikin". On Cow Appreciation Day (11 July 2008), any customer who shows up at a Chick-fil-A store fully dressed as a cow gets a free combo meal. Last year, 4,000--yes, that's four thousand--customers did just that.

How much would you supposed 4,000 combo meals costs Chick-fil-A? I don't know but let's just say their costs average $5 per meal (that may be high). That's a paltry $20,000. The promotional costs are probably much more significant, but still my guess is they take a low-key, cost-effective approach that relies heavily on word-of-mouth.

The reason I like this campaign so much is that it ties customers so directly into Chick-fil-A's brand positioning, and it is experience-based.  And think about the impact on customers who show up at stores that day who had no idea what was going on, only to see a bunch of crazy people in cow costumes eating their free combo meals. It's a beautiful thing.

Another Nail in the Satisfaction Coffin

I am toying with the idea of becoming a full-time crusader against the entirely preventable disease of satisfactionitis. This terrible scourge of businesses worldwide is wreaking untold damage on brand health as it shouts "All is well!" while true loyalty ebbs away. We can eliminate this in our lifetime if we work together!

And here's another example of the deception of satisfactionitis. The UK-based e-zine CustomerStrategy reports "Customer satisfaction with airlines no guide to success." According to the article:

According to figures from YouGov’s Brandindex  looking at customer satisfaction with British Airways, EasyJet and Ryanair all three are satisfying fewer customers than two years ago. Yet while Ryanair’s customer satisfaction has fallen more sharply than that of EasyJet its customer growth seems to have surpassed its rival.

Hmm, customer satisfaction falling while business volume increases...? Who wants to argue that satisfaction is a good indicator of business performance?

Seriously folks, please move on...the use of a satisfaction anchored scale is SO 1970s...if you really want to understand whether or not you are delivering a customer experience that drives loyalty, you've got to cure your satisfactionitis pronto.

What would YOU do if you were an airline CEO?

Forbes recently reported what any of us who travel regularly already know: customer satisfaction with the airline industry just hit its lowest level in three years. But rather than add to the digital pile-on in the blogosphere with another illustration of the horror that airline travel has become, let's think about this from an airline CEO's perspective.

You're facing an explosion in fuel costs that is draining cash flow, and you know if things don't change and you don't do something you're going to fly right into bankruptcy. So you start cutting capacity and focusing on your most profitable routes...but you know this is going to make travelers even more miserable as planes are consistently packed to the overhead bins with people, and it's tough to get from "here to there" anymore if it's not a major route. You also start adding fees wherever you can on the theory that "every little bit helps"...again knowing this angers customers even more. It looks like you've got a business where the only way to make a buck--or just not lose too many of them--is to throw any notion of "a branded customer experience" out the window.

What would you do? And note, the answer "I'd do what Southwest is doing" doesn't fly [sorry], because you have to have some kind of differentiation. And, frankly, several of the big guys will say they tried that anyway (United's TED, Rest In Peace).

I'll weigh in with my idea later; for now, I'd like to hear from you.

Experience-Based Segmentation

A colleague and I were recently discussing the issue of whether or not companies are really successful in applying segmentation strategies from a customer experience viewpoint. We quickly agreed on examples where customers pay differentiated prices to experience differentiated service levels, e.g. first vs. coach class on a commercial flight, expedited shipping for an online order, front-row seats at a concert. But these are examples where customers self-segment the experience based on their value equation.

Are there examples of successful experience-based segmentation strategies that do not involve differentiated pricing? An illustration would be the leisure vs. business traveler checking into the exact same hotel, paying the same room rate for the identical type of room. Ideally, the leisure traveler would experience an "on boarding" process that is different from the business traveler, in a way that speaks to the context and expectations each have. For example the leisure traveler might get a more relaxed and paced check-in process that gives extra information about using the property for leisure purposes; the business traveler's experience might emphasize efficiency and business-related amenities.

Can anyone think of good examples of companies (B2C or B2B) that are delivering segmented experiences for the same core service or product, without relying on the customer to self-select via the pricing structure?  If so, how do they do it?

The Importance of Fairness

I was traveling back from New York to Chicago on American Airlines out of LaGuardia. It was the familiar scene...lots of frustrated travelers due to canceled flights and weather delays. My flight was oversold, but at least I had a [middle] seat, boarding group 4. I was traveling with my usual carry-on package: my rolling briefcase and a standard-size roll-a-board. I've traveled all over the country carrying on these pieces, with many different airlines.

It was a full flight. I had my briefcase stacked on top of my roll-a-board as I approached the gate agent. She decided it looked like I had "two large bags" and decided I had to check the roll-a-board. I protested but she gave me one of those disdainful looks like "You don't get it pal, I make these decisions" and she proceeded to have an associate tag it. This was not a plane-side check where I could grab it again on the way off the plane; this was a full under-the-plane, wait-forever-at-O'Hare-to-get-it-back check.

I was ticked.

But not for the reason you might think. It's not because they had to check it; it's because she singled me out on the basis of faulty judgment that was totally unfair. Passengers in front of me and behind me rolled their same-sized-stuff right on (and when I got on, there was plenty of room for my roll-a-board to go in the overhead, while my rolling briefcase always goes under the seat).

Customer experiences that happen in groups or crowds have some extra dimensions, don't they? You have to consider the social effects. This includes fairness. An otherwise good experience goes bad quickly when we think we are being treated unfairly relative to everyone else around us who is immersed in the same experience. Do you train your customer-facing staff for fairness?

Another Counterpunch to Net Promoter

I think we all know that the Net Promoter Score(R) debate has been going on for awhile now, and I've written about it before (see "NPS is Dead...Long Live NPS", "A Missed Opportunity - NPS Redux", and "The Debate, Not Net Promoter, Is The Problem"). But I just spotted some "new news" over at IndustryWeek in the form of an article called "Viewpoint -- Customer Feedback Professionals Question Customer Relationship Management Method", written by Bob Hayes, president of Business Over Broadway. The net takeaway is that a lot people who specialize in customer feedback/research for their companies are--ahem--detractors of the NPS method.

This will come as no surprise to NPS's inventor and chief promoter, Fred Reichheld, who has chosen to stay above (actually, I'd say "out of") the ongoing debate. Fred's not too interested in what research professionals think; he pretty much blames them for all of the obfuscating complexity in customer research, and has positioned NPS as the white knight to rescue CEOs from the tangled webs their researchers are weaving. Here's the truth: NPS grossly oversimplifies as much as some research-led initiatives over-complicate, and both get in the way of effective, practical insight to improve customer experience and develop stronger customer loyalty.