As increasingly leading companies are committed to customer satisfaction, and while it is quite obvious to most managers and their employees that customer enthusiasm can lead to positive effects
for the company in the short term, customer enthusiasm is defined as a long-term objective or as a strategy, management often still has skepticism as to whether this is a viable basic
framework:
"If we offer the customer something more than he expects to surprise and inspire him, then we have to constantly develop our services as the customer gets used to higher or better
performance. Why should we do that? "
This intuitively quite comprehensible and legitimate question primarily addresses the problem that, due to habituation effects, customer enthusiasm can quickly wear out and lead to an expectation
or quality spiral in quintessence, which would be costly-but not successful. Certainly, a customer can not be enthused by the company all the time. In some situations it may be
sufficient to really satisfy the customer. However, the following aspects are often forgotten, which ultimately suggest a fundamental deficit in the understanding and dealing with
services:
Most companies are moving to competitive markets. As with products, it is equally true for services that they must be continuously developed. In Germany there’s a suspected mentality
problem, often showing in questions in the sense of "Why do we have to develop our product?" A question like that would probably never be posed to an engineer.
Services are viewed as free additional services for customers and thus perceived as a pure cost factor. However, at first sight, the earnings and sales potentials, which can be generated
with innovative and inspiring services, are mostly not recognized.
And often it is precisely the low-cost or free service components such as friendliness, commitment and reliability of the staff, which always inspire customers. This is illustrated by the
following simple example. These days, customer of large retail chains passing at the entrance or exit are often scrutinized quite suspiciously by security staff. Here, it would be
necessary to train staff to ensure that they welcome the customers friendly when they entered the shop and again when leaving. There’s still great potential in any such simple
approaches to improvement. This is particularly true if competition doesn’t succeed in successfully implementing a corresponding service culture. Sadly, this is not the exception, but
often the rule.