How can you guarantee how another person will feel and think? There are so many variables involved, most important of which is the human variable.

Does it not make much more sense to guarantee that the Customer/Guest will receive what you offer in terms of product quality, type and quality of service, ambiance, timing, delivery, including well trained and knowledgeable staff, and so forth?

How can anyone on earth guarantee how someone else will feel? I think this is treating customers or guests as a set of predictable herds and an insult to their intelligence and their individuality as human beings.

Today someone wrote back to me that a customer satisfaction guarantee is a good marketing gimmick and that the companies offering this take into account that they would have to refund some customers who would claim that they were not satisfied.

Something happened this afternoon which reconfirms my belief that one should not guarantee expecting to repay a percentage of refunds. The incident has to do with a well known large retail chain, where I shop.

As you know, each store has "specials of the week". Well, I often buy these specials. Usually with vegetables you can see if this special is really a special or if the vegetables started rotting. The same retailer puts on special poultry and meat which definitely looks like it is going bad. In the past, before I realized that they put on special things that have started going bad, I had bought packaged "fresh" fish there only to find out upon opening the package at home that there was a strong smell indicating the fish had gone bad. Well, I never buy their poultry or meat or fish on special any more. Of course they quickly repay the price of what you claim to have gone bad - but I have a very bad impression of this retailer - what type of policy is this? On the other hand, they are near buy and I buy there my dairy products and bread + vegetables sometimes.

Today it is the second time I discover that the yams I had bought on special by them were already rotten on the inside. With yams it is impossible to guess until you bake them, peel them and maybe try to have a bite. Last time I thought it was a unique occurrence but this time I shall definitely ask to speak to the manager of the store and tell him they already acquired a bad name in the neighbourhood because of their "special" policy. If they still want to sell products that went bad, they should put a label there saying these products began to rot and they are not responsible over food poisoning.

Jackie, wouldn't this be equivalent to a car dealership who would put on special a car which they know is ready to break up any minute on the road?

When you buy a car, a camera or a toaster oven, you receive a warranty – a guarantee that the product will work. How often have you seen a warranty for restaurant meals? Hardly ever. Yet it is here, in buying a service like a restaurant meal, that the assurance of a guarantee would presumably count most.

Can service be guaranteed?
Many people believe that, by definition, services simply can't be guaranteed. Services are generally delivered by human beings, who are known to be less predictable than machines. To complicate it further, services are produced and consumed at the same time.

It is easy to guarantee a camera, which can be inspected before the buyer gets it and which can be returned to the factory for repairs. Obviously, you don't have the same opportunities with a restaurant meal.

But that does not mean that you cannot guarantee guest satisfaction. At first glance, guaranteeing that guests will have a great time seems a little crazy. After all, there are lots of factors that determine whether a person has a good time or not, and not all of them are under your control.

On closer examination, though, the idea isn't as crazy as it seems.

You are going to take the hit anyway
Regardless of where the fault lies, anything that causes your guests to have less than a great time reflects on the restaurant. Since you are going to suffer anyway, making a commitment to giving your guests a great time will force you to do it!

Your company exists only to make your guests happy. Every time a guest leaves your restaurant with a more optimistic view of the world, you have done your job; every time you fail to raise a guest's spirits with good food, gratifying service and a soothing atmosphere, you have not!

To the extent that you delight your guests, you will move in the direction of becoming the most successful restaurant in the market.

This may seem pretty obvious – a useful motto that most restaurants understandably overlook in the day-to-day flood of details – but I believe that your passionate commitment to this goal of excellence is the key to your growth and profits.

Consistency counts
You see, in order to offer this guarantee and not lose your shirt, you have to be consistently great, consistently professional, consistently alert and responsive to what your guests want.

When you are willing to put your money where your mouth is, it requires that you stay focused on providing memorable service according to the standards of your guests.

What does this mean in practice? Simply that everyone in the company, regardless of position, has the responsibility and authority to do whatever they believe is necessary to be sure the guest has a great time every time they dine with you.

Your staff should not need someone else's permission first and there should never be any repercussions for any actions taken in the cause of delivering memorable guest service.

The real cost
This is obviously going to cost you money when you make mistakes or fail to satisfy your guests and have to make it right. However, if you are not satisfying your guests, it is already costing you money! If you don't have to pay off, you just don't know how much you are losing!

By getting your breakdowns out in the open, you can start to identify the causes and figure out how to eliminate the problem. When you start looking at system failures, you can see where you may have done an ineffective job of training or where your delivery system is too complex. You can identify a menu item that is impossible to prepare.

System failures
System failure costs are not the same as staff failure costs. In fact, it is helpful to look at all failures as system failures. (We explore this idea at greater length in Chapter 35.)

Staff failures are actually breakdowns in your selection system (you hired the wrong person), your development system (they were not adequately trained) or your coaching system (their performance was not properly monitored).

System failure costs measure the extent of the confusion in company structure, for which the company alone is responsible.

You should welcome every payoff on your service guarantee – every system failure expense – as an otherwise lost insight into your business. It is a clue as to where the gold is hidden.

You can make every problem pay a dividend if you avoid band-aid solutions and insist on finding the real cause of each problem. You actually want to pay off on your guarantee. Every dollar you give away points to a problem you can fix.

Appropriateness
As part of your training, you should discuss appropriateness. It might be inappropriate, for example, to comp an entire meal if you were late delivering the salad. If you spill soup on a guest, it would be very appropriate to give them enough money for cleaning, replace the soup and give them something unexpected for their trouble.

Discussing appropriateness with your staff will help them be more comfortable when dealing with guests who may be upset.

Thank you for finding the time to visit and for your inspiring guidelines.

You do say "Since you are going to suffer anyway, making a commitment to giving
your guests a great time will force you to do it!"

This is exactly my point: you can guarantee something you yourself have control of, like giving excellent service, giving a great time, etc. but one cannot guarantee "satisfaction" of another party. One should guarantee what one can do, serve, and the way it is served - not how it is perceived by different individuals.

Sometimes management's idea of giving a great time is to have a poolside barbecue party once a week - which is great and pleases most hotel guests. Yet how many guests complain saying the noise reaches their room and they cannot sleep.

How many guests did we have then in Tel Aviv Hilton who complained constantly about the people on the beach (below the hotel) playing racketball. You hear a group of regular "tock, tock, tock, tock). We had no control over this. Anyhow today the playing has moved further westward and the noise doesn't reach the guests. Other guests just loved to go out on the balcony and watch all those people having fun - they even changed and went there themselves to join in the fun.

Some guests' idea of fun and feeling happy and satisfied about the environment offered by their stay by us was totally different from others'.

No, in reality you cannot guarantee customer satisfaction. However, this in not just a marketing gimmick. It goes much beyond that.

The guarantee of customer satisfaction should not be defined by Webster's dictionary. I do not think most customers would even expect it. It is a promise on your part to try to do your best to achieve this outcome.

In this case where customer satisfaction is undefined, so is the guarantee. It would be difficult, but not impossible to refund money on any complaint.

Any business should strive for great customer satisfaction and at least have an unwritten guarantee for it.

It is for the fact that certain places have awful service or what-have-you and that they do not care which brings the importance of letting customers know that your establishment does care, and is willing to back it up.

Is it your first encounter with the famous Bill Marvin? Bill is an innovator, an original thinker, a first-class professional. His books are excellent. I wanted so much to hear him speak that I tried to get him in the Vancouver market, then got busy. Do go to his website and read his articles http://www.restaurantdoctor.com

Best regards,

Bill Marvin hits the nail on the head when he says that you are going to lose anyway, if you don't correct a customer's complaints.

If I sell a car and that car has a problem, I have two choices.
I can tell the customer to go away, that the car was bought 'as is', and that it's not my problem. (This is my legal position - I am quite within my rights to do so, and it is what many used car dealers acually do!)
That customer will bad-mouth the company all over town, I will lose repeat business, referral business and, eventually, my reputation. Who can put a cost on that?

Alternatively, I can spend, for example, $100 to correct the problem, have a delighted customer who tells all his/her friends and who becomes a customer for life.
Again, what's the value of that? I think anyone would agree that the $100 was well spent.

Claire, I was interested to hear about your experience with supermarket 'specials'. You are right when you say it is equivalent to me selling a bad car. Nobody wins.

I like to turn over my inventory within 90 days. When I have had a car for 60 days, it is evaluated to see why it has not sold. Sometimes we discover why and fix the problem. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw.
When a car reaches it's 90 day birthday, I need the car to go if I am to stick to my policy of having fresh vehicles. I used to send those vehicles to auction where they invariably sold for less than I owned them for.

Now I have a different system. They become 'specials'. (Remember, there is nothing wrong with these vehicles.) I reduce the price to cost + commission. Therefore, I don't make money, but I don't lose. Indeed, I hope to get repeat and referral business. The customer gets a great car at a great price - a GENUINE 'special'. The salesman gets commission he would not have received had I sent the car to auction. Everybody is happy.

From: Jacques Werth
To: "'Claire Belilos'"
Subject: RE: Can we guarantee Customer/Guest Satisfaction? Follow-up on ourprevious correspondence
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 14:55:43 -0500

It's not really a guarantee of "satisfaction." Most people understand
it to be a guarantee that they will try to satisfy you and if they don't they'll try to make it right.

I think it's just good marketing based on a reasonable expectation that most, not all, customers are reasonable and will be satisfied with the services and/or products that they provide. They expect that a certain percentage of their customers will request a refund due to their dissatisfaction, some reasonably and some not.

They absorb the cost of the few cheaters. They would rather give a refund and have a good chance of retaining the future business
of an unhappy customer than ignore their dissatisfaction and have a high probability of no business from them in the future.

I'm not claiming that I'm typical, but here are two examples from my personal experience.
1. About twenty years ago, I stayed at a Holiday Inn in the Orlando area where the lock on the door malfunctioned and I couldn't get into my room for three hours after returning from a late dinner. They finally changed the lock and I got in. I had to lead an all day training workshop the next day on too little sleep. I told the manager and
he took the entire day's bill including the room and two meals off my bill. I've stayed at Holiday Inns occasionally since then.

2. Thirty-two years ago, Northwest Airlines bumped my 13 year old son, who was traveling alone, off a connecting flight in Minneapolis. There was no flight until the next day. When he called me from
Minneapolis the plane was still on the ground. So I called Northwest Airlines to explain and ask them to either reconsider, or to reroute him on other flights to Redding, CA. They refused, and they were very
arrogant about it, too. He had to spend the night in a motel that was remote from the airport. They gave him $4 dollars for meals. It was not a pleasant experience for me, though my son didn't mind it.

In the last 32 years, I've traveled hundreds of thousands miles, and I've had salespeople working from me who have flown tens of millions of miles. None of those millions of miles were on Northwest unless it was absolutely unavoidable. If Northwest had apologized about the way they handled my son, and given me a refund, or some other
make-nice, they might have had our business for some of those millions of miles.

Jacques Werth
High Probability Selling
Acclaimed by the New York Times
http://www.highprobsell.com

I have always believed that customer with a problem is an opportunity.
For the airline, they had the choice of pleasing Mr. Werth and getting perhaps thousands or more dollars-worth of business, or ensuring that Mr. Werth and his employees never flew with them again.

Employees who deal with customers need to be aware that they never know who they are dealing with. Every customer is valuable, no matter who they are.

Several years ago I was decorating my home back in England and I called my father's business (one of a large group of car dealerships)to speak to the maintenance man there (I wanted to borrow ladders or something - I don't remember what.) The person who dealt with me on the phone was downright rude when I asked to speak to Tom. ("This is sales, we don't have time to find him, he's not allowed to take personal calls, we have better things to do, do us a favor darlin' and get off the phone etc.")

Incensed, I got into my car and drove to my father's business. I walked into the showroom (looking very scruffy - remember I was decorating) and found the person in question. He continued to be rude and horrible. The other salesmen (all of whom knew me) gathered around in a mix of horror and amusement. Eventually, one of the salesmen took pity on him and told him that the person he was treating so badly was the owner's daughter.

My point is, you never know who you are dealing with, no matter how they are dressed or what your own personal opinion of them is.

We had a guy walk onto our dealership recently in pjamas and bedroom slippers (things are pretty relaxed here in South Florida!)The salesmen saw him walk onto the lot and none of them was very enthusiastic about going to talk to him. The lucky salesman who did however, sold him two cars for cash!

Since that day, my salesmen know that you never know who you're talking to and that you should never judge by appearances!

How important is the guarantee in the marketing? Would it be better if it weren't used in marketing, but were ingrained in your salespeople. IE: Your operating mantra becomes "If the person isn't satisfied, make them satisfied regardless of cost."

Maybe that makes your employees more attuned to the customer. Maybe it makes customers watch you do things well and marvel rather than look at the sign on the wall and see if you live up to it.

I am very impressed with good service when I feel like it's coming from a well trained employee in a good system. Does the written guarantee take away from this?

An example: I went to Disney with my family and not once did I see a sign that mentioned that if I weren't satisfied I'd get a refund, etc. However, over a period of six days we managed to have to 1) change rooms because of people smoking in the next room 2) forget our travelers cheques were in the safe in the old room and 3) have a major problem at a restaurant with our waiter. (Yet, it was still a very enjoyable vacation!) In EVERY instance were were well taken care of. We had employees fawning over us to help. No sign posted about how we'll feel. No "guarantee."

Is Disney extraordinary? Or can we just "expect" this service from "Jackie's Auto Dealership" like we did at Disney?

I, for one, agree with you that we had better ingrain the principle in our minds and the minds of each member of the operation rather than just using the words in marketing material. Today I heard a story a bit similar to yours but the guest never forgot how he was really surprised when the hotel deducted that night's stay from his bill because of a mishap (getting a smoking room instead of a non-smoking room, which they immediately corrected within 5 minutes). Besides this occurrence, all was first class in this hotel and he always recommended it, returned to it often, had friends and business associates go there, etc.

Some operations do live this way. I think you and Jackie would enjoy reading "The Nordstrom Way" showing how the high value the Nordstroms place on Customer satisfaction and their communicating this value as the No. 1 drive in their organization led to their extraordinary success. Their clients are very loyal to them. They shop only at Nordstrom's. If there is no Nordstrom at the city they visit they just wait till they get to a city having their clothing store. The Nordstrom people go out of their way for the customers - please read the book.

Grace & Peace,
Scott Ott
scottott@epsi.net
http://www.epsi.net/scottott/my_story.htm
(816) 630-4110

Welcome back! you have been away for too long. Thanks for "gracing" us with your presence again.

What you ask about "guidelines" for the staff to adhere to is what Bill Marvin calls "appropriateness" in his above posting as follows; note that he stresses "discussing" with your staff. I got the impression that at your company, they issue one-sided guidelines. Discussing means sharing ideas, feedback and agreeing. Usually such management also delegates decision-making authority to the personnel, especially front-line employees since they are the ones who have to solve the problem as it arises in the best possible manner. Here is his posting:

" Appropriateness
As part of your training, you should discuss
appropriateness. It might be inappropriate, for example, to comp an entire meal if you were late delivering the salad. If you spill soup on a guest, it would be very appropriate to give them enough money for cleaning, replace the soup and give them something unexpected for their trouble.

Discussing appropriateness with your staff will help them be more comfortable when dealing with guests who may be upset.

The goal of it all, however, is simply to help assure that every guest will have a marvelous experience every time they dine with you. "

Maybe you can lead to more sharing and delegation at Wal-Mart.