CUSTOMER SATISFACTION GRAFFITI
Richard Feinberg, Ph.D.
Center for Customer-Driven Quality
Purdue University
1. The more high tech the world becomes, the more people crave high touch service.
John Naisbett, Megatrends
2. Customers do not buy products or services so much as they buy expectations.
Ted Levitt, The Marketing Imagination
3. The cost of landing a new customer is more than five times the cost of retaining an existing one.
Robert Desatnick, Managing to Keep Customers
4. A loyal customer is worth thousands of dollars over the life of their relationship with your company.
Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos
5. Seventy-two percent of the consumers who switch to a competitor did so because of customer service problems.
A study by The Forum Corporation
6. Only two percent of unhappy customers complain, while thirty-four percent of all dissatisfied customers penalized the manufacturer by quietly switching brands.
The study by The A.C. Nielsen Company
7. Sixty-eight percent of customers switch suppliers because of the indifference shown them by customer service personnel.
Tom Peters, U.S. News and World Report
8. Sixty-one percent of consumers polled say their pre-purchase decisions were most influenced by the opinions of their friends, i.e. the importance of word of mouth.
General Electric Study, The Information Challenge
9. The answer is yes…now what is the question?
Waitress at LoneStar Steakhouse
10. In the long run, the most important single factor affecting a company's performance is the quality of its customer service relative to that of its competitors.
Robert Buzzell and Bradley Gale, Linking Strategy to Performance
11. By the way customers act, you'd think they own this company. And, in a way, they do!
Anonymous
12. Customer service expectations can be categorized into five overall dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, Empathy, tangibles.
Leonard Berry, Service Quality
13. Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!
Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence
14. Undertake not what you cannot perform, but be careful to keep your promise.
George Washington
15. Consistent, high-quality service boils down to two equally important things: caring and competence.
Chip Bell and Ron Zemke, Service Wisdom
16. Customers don't care what you know, until they know that you care.
Digital Equipment Corporation, Customer Service Department
17. Listening is about trust and respect and involvement and information sharing more than it is about ears.
Beverly Briggs, Customer Connection Newsletter
18. Caring, respect, empathy, politeness are very important customer satisfiers that cost nothing.
Anonymous
19. The simplest and yet the most powerful words in customer service are "Thank You."
Anonymous
20. Customers don't expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things quickly when things go wrong.
Donald Porter, British Airways
21. Customers are our best friends.
Anonymous
22. When our customers rate us better or worse than somebody else, it's never very scientific, but it's always disastrous if you score low!
Jack Welsh, CEO, General Electric
23. Total quality customer service cannot be stored in inventory, it must be 100% available upon demand.
Anonymous
24. Experienced and loyal employees are five times more likely to create satisfied loyal customers.
Anonymous
25. No company can produce outstanding customer service unless its top management are visibly, constantly, and sometimes irrationally committed to the idea.
David Davidow and Bro Uttal, Total Customer Service
26. Culture is nothing more than the values, beliefs, and norms of a group of people. Corporate leaders shape cultures, and the corporate culture is key to delivering total quality customer service.
Richard Normann, Service Management
27. People seem to noticE when you're everywhere. So how do you get there? Instead
of worrying about how to drive people to your website, find creative ways to be on
everyone else's. Provide a service that makes their websites far more useful, and
they won't be able to live without you. You'll populate the Internet, be more visible,
and, oh, yeah, become more profitable.
www.hp.com/e-services
28. To deliver total quality customer service, your pledge should be: "Look out customers - I'm gonna knock your socks off!"
Kristin Anderson and Ron Zemke, Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service
29. You never have a second chance to make a first impression, and unfortunately, first impressions are the most lasting in a customer's mind.
Anonymous
30. In striving for total quality customer service, you're not looking for fault, but you're striving to produce a solution as quickly as possible.
Anonymous
31. You need customers much more than they need you.
Anonymous
32. If we can improve customer satisfaction by only one percent, it means $275,000,000 in revenue to us over the next five years.
Robert LaBant, IBM Corporation
33. A 5% increase in customer retention equates to approximately a 100% increase in profits.
Robert Sasser, Harvard Business Review
34. Customer complaints are opportunities for improvement and the key to future sales.
Anonymous
35. If you think you don't need customers, try doing without them for 30 days.
Richard Feinberg, Purdue University
36. The essence of business success is treating customers and selling products which overtime makes the customer view you as the supplier of choice each time, every time.
Richard Feinberg, Purdue University
37. Customer Delight is a state of experience in which the customer exclaims "WOW, that was the greatest __________ (fill in the name of your product) ever!"
Richard Feinberg, Purdue University
38. Treat the customer as appreciating assets.
Tom Peters, Author/Consultant
39. You achieve customer satisfaction when you sell merchandise that doesn’t come back to a customer who does.
Stanley Marcus, Founder of Nieman-Marcus
40. Our customers are our number one sales force.
John Scully, Former CEO of Apple Computers
41. You cannot expect your employees to delight your customers unless you, as an employer, delight your employees.
Carla Paonessa, Partner, Anderson Consulting
42. American Airlines calculated that if they had one more customer on each flight in a given year, the difference in revenue would have been about $114 million. How much is one customer worth to you?
Guerilla Marketing Newsletter
43. Of America’s 100 largest companies at the beginning of this century, only 16 are still in business.
Across the Board Magazine, September 1994
44. In commercials, Mr. Goodwrench is always smiling and wearing a freshly pressed uniform and returning a repaired car to a delighted owner, against the backdrop of a ludicrously hygienic garage filled with industrious auto repair technicians who are clearly capable of repairing the Space Shuttle. Has any US automobile owner ever actually encountered a repair department like this?
Dave Barry, Humor Columnist
45. What the customer buys and considers value is never the product. It is always...what the product or service does for him.
Peter Drucker, 1974
46. If we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got.
Rick Lowry, Cotter & Company, 1990’s
47. Customers don’t want their money back, they want a product that works properly.
Dan Burton, writing in Fortune
48. Ask the lowest level front line people about your business. Sometimes they don’t know not to tell the truth.
Jim Robisch, Farnsworth Group
49. The success of Coca-Cola is not the result of government intervention. It is because consumers like the stuff.
Andrew Young, on Face the Nation
50. The dollar bills the customer gets from the teller in four banks are the same. What is different are the tellers.
Stanley Marcus, Chairman Emeritus, Neiman-Marcus
51. Retail clerk to customer: “Any chance you could do your own paperwork, ring yourself up and say, ‘thank you, come again,’ on your way out the door?”
Cartoon by Goff
52. What I have found most valuable in this rotation was witnessing the voice of the customer first-hand. Instead of reading figures indicating which product concerns are most often complained about, I have felt the emotional impact that these product concerns can have on customers. I have seen the wide range of expectations placed on the motto “quality is job 1.” I have heard the voice of the customer, and I will be a better engineer for it.
Charlie Choi, Ford College graduate program trainee, advanced vehicle engineering and technology--Call Center experience
53. Listening to customer must become everybody’s business. With most competitors moving ever faster, the race will go to those who listen (and respond) most intently.”
Tom Peters, Thriving On Chaos
54. Talking to customers tends to counteract the most self-destructive habit of all companies--that of listening to ourselves.
J. Brooks
55. “That’s Not My Job” This is a story about four people named everybody, somebody, anybody and nobody. There was an important job to be done and everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was everybody’s job. Everybody thought anybody could do it, but nobody realized that everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have.
Anonymous
56. “My Bias” Companies should strive for WOW--100% customer satisfaction. They should be prepared to respond when things go wrong. How you respond is the acid test for the 21st century.
Richard Feinberg, Purdue University
57. There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Niccolo Machiavelli, from The Prince
58. Do make certain that your customer wants are truly that—and not merely what some people in the company think the customers want. The need for solid customer information is absolute; it will directly affect the quality of everything else that occurs in the process. Garbage in, garbage out.
William Barnard and Thomas Wallace, The Innovation Edge
59. Imagine, as a consumer, how much more seriously your consumer complaint would be taken if you were complaining from inside an armored vehicle capable of reducing the entire “Customer Service” department to tiny smoking shards. What I am saying is: Forget the Automated Answering system. Get a tank.
Dave Barry, Humor Columnist
60. Groucho Marx despised the empty clichés of customer service correspondence. A letter from a bank manager ended with the standard phrase, “If I can be of any service to you, do not hesitate to call me.” He immediately took pen to paper. “Dear Sir,” Groucho wrote. “The best thing you can do to be of service to me is to steal some money from the account of one of your richest clients and credit it to mine.”
The Executive Speechwriter Newsletter, Volume 11 Number 4
61. “A discovery by Xerox shattered conventional wisdom: Its totally satisfied customers were six times more likely to repurchase Xerox products over the next 18 months than its satisfied customer. The implications were profound: Merely satisfying customers who have the freedom to make choices is not enough to keep them loyal. The only truly loyal customers are totally satisfied customers.”
Harvard Business Review, Nov./Dec. 1995
62. General Telephone Co. in Los Angeles was making a film for its employees. The original script included this dramatization showing how to handle customers’ complaints: Customer: “You just can’t rely on your damn phone company for anything!” Employee: “You get your bill every month don’t you?”
The Executive Speechwriter Newsletter, Volume 11 Number 4
63. GE’s goal is not to become smaller but to “get that small-company soul and small-company speed inside our big-company body.”
Jack Welch, CEO, GE
64. Every time a company is given an order by a customer, that company, at that moment, is the best choice in the world.
Ken Hammer, Businessman
65. You don’t sell what it is, you sell what it does.
The Executive Speechwriter Newsletter, Volume 9 Number 1
66. The best way to win a Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award for yourself is to help your customer win one first.
The Executive Speechwriter Newsletter, Volume 9 Number 1
67. On October 4, 1957, the top ten businesses in Chicago were Swift, Standard Oil, Armour, International Harvester, Inland Steel, Wilson, Sears, Montgomery Ward, Prudential Insurance and the First National Bank of Chicago. Thirty-five years later, the list of Chicago’s top businesses, ranked by sales, is a little different. It still includes Sears and First National, but it also includes CAN Financial, Amoco, Continental Bank, Citicorp Diner’s Club, and Commonwealth Edison. But ranked by market capitalization, which many would agree is a more meaningful measure Chicago’s biggest companies include Ameritech, Abbott Labs, McDonald’s, Motorola, Waste Management, and Baxter. These lists dramatically illustrate the evolution that American business has gone through over the past 35 years—an evolution characterized by a move away from commodities and commodity type manufacturing to financial services, health care and technology in many different formats. The list also leads to the next questions: Which companies will be among the top ten in the next 35 years?
Richard Rosenberg, Chairman & CEO of BankAmerica Corp., 1993
68. Quality isn’t about money, it’s about caring. It’s about wanting to be the best because there is personal pride at state—an individual declaration of identity with the product. There is always a market for the best, all over the globe. It’s an obvious and well-known fact that mountain climbers don’t like to buy discounted climbing ropes. And there’s the joke about the parachute offer for sale—cheap, slightly irregular, but used only once. When something is important as life and death—and all business decisions should be—quality is irreplaceable.
Hap Klopp, President, The North Face (world’s largest producer of outdoor adventure equipment)
69. Quality is the only patent protection we’ve got.
James Robinson III, CEO, American Express Corp., 1992
70. People forget how fast you did a job—but they remember how well you did it.
Howard Newton (1903-1951), American advertising executive
71. We know exactly where we want to go because our customers will show us the way.
Jerry Stead, CEO, AT&T Global Information Solutions
72. In the long run, our customers are going to determine whether we have a job or not. Their attitude toward us is going to be the factor determining our success. Every employee must resolve that their most important duty is to our customers.