Improve Customer Experience through “Say-Do ratio”

As mentioned in my earlier blog “Excellence through Say-Do Ratio”,  https://personalandprofessionalexcellence.blogspot.com/2013/09/excellence-through-say-do-ratio.html,  Say-Do ratio is a simple yet effective tool to achieve excellence. In this blog, I am going to talk about how it can be used to improve the customer experience between various seller/customer pairs.

Let me quickly recap the definition of Say-Do Ratio to help us with our topic of the day.  Say-Do ratio is a ratio which depicts adherence to the commitments made, i.e. commitments adhered / commitments made.

Customer experience is a result of interaction between the response a customer gets throughout the process to procure any product/service vis-à-vis the expectations he/she has, before starting the process. If the response matches the expectations, customer brands it as a “GOOD Experience”, if expectations are not met, the experience varies on the negative side and if customer gets something beyond what is expected, the experience gets labeled as SUPERLATIVE. If we keep this simple rule in mind and apply Say-Do ratio, we know if our customers are going to get a Superlative experience or not. Customer expectations are the “Say” portion and response from process (how customer is treated) provides “Do” portion of the ratio.

Expectations are the perceptions created in the minds of customer by the communication received from seller and as understood by customer. Accurate, precise and transparent communication helps in building right customer expectations, which a seller can surpass while servicing them to achieve the desired SUPERLATIVE customer experience. A flier that goes to customer or an e-mail offer that goes to her mailbox or an advertisement that is aired on the local FM channel are some of the tools we have at our disposal to influence the expectations. Many times, we find that flier contains a super duper offer in big bold type (a great hook) with exclusions and other terms & conditions in small type. Customer is likely to miss reading these exclusions as well as terms & conditions; as a result, expectations created in his/her mind are without the conditions mentioned in small type. So even if we are stating the correct things (legally right), we are not creating the appropriate expectations. When customer comes to store to avail that offer and is denied because of some conditions (which are not read by her), it creates a huge negative experience in her mind. You are adhering to the things which you have stated in your communication but have created a negative customer experience. Let us look at two communications “75% discount on product A till the stock lasts” and “75% discount on product A for first thousand customers” the second communication creates the right impression by telling customers that they should be among first 1000 customers and if they miss it, because they are late, the experience does not get impacted, where as if customer has received first communication, she does not know how much is in stock. If she does not get the product at the discounted price, she always thinks that the number of items on sale were very few and the advertisement was only a gimmick which creates a clear negative experience.

A right balance between creating a pull through glamorous advertisement and stating facts about complete offer which will not be missed by the customer can help in terms of creating reasonably accurate expectations in the minds of customer. What do you say, how much do you commit, what are the boundaries, etc. The communications could be for the Homes that a builder is selling or Refrigerator a store is selling or it could be Services an IT provider is going to provide; succinct and adequate communication about what customer is getting like features, price line/discounts, warranties, timelines, deliveries, after sales services, etc. shapes the expectations of the customer. These transactions have long lifespan and every aspect of communication plays a role in different interactions at different stage in the life cycle and customer experience starts shaping up as customer progresses through these stages.

We have seen that how we can get a correct denominator (customer expectations) and what can be done to “Say” it right to customer, it is time to surpass what we have said through what we “do”, how we transact with customer during every interaction of the process. Since we know exactly what we have said and can estimate reasonably well about the expectations that will be created in the minds of customers, we can prepare ourselves to surpass the expectations.

Continuing with the example in the earlier paragraph, if the advertisement was to provide 75% discount to first 1000 customers and in case of real rush, you can create a superlative experience by adding some more quantity to the discounted stock. In this process you have created a SUPERLATIVE experience for the customer no 1001 onward. One of the areas where COSTCO creates a superlative experience is through implementation (“do”) of their return policy for their customers. Some of the insurance companies create a significantly negative customer experience through their unfriendly behavior during claims processing. You know exactly what you are committing so commit in such a manner that when it is time to “do” you can do much better than commitment. Modulating what you Say based on what you can do can help in improving your Say-Do ratio thus customer experience.  Start measuring the Say-Do ratio for your key deals, transactions at multiple locations, with multiple customers and see if you have the ratio greater than 1, if yes, you are doing good and continue to do the same.