Are Your Customers Delighted?
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
In the process improvement world of Six Sigma, the word
The use of quadrants and matrices in business to gauge where you are is not uncommon. I immediately think of Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant and Stephen Pierce’s Cycle of Success I heard about at the Dallas World Internet Summit a couple of weeks ago (as of this writing) to name a couple. And in both cases, there is a most desired quadrant of the four to be in.
And then there are the bells and whistles associated with unexpected or “exciting” quality. In this day and age an example might be an SUV that gets 100 MPG! 
The following graph shows how to capture what I just described graphically. This is also known as the Kano Model:
That was a tangible product example. Let’s look at a recent real life service example:
My husband went out to a local grocery store this weekend to grab a few last minute items he forgot to buy earlier for a barbeque we hosted yesterday. When you go to a grocery store you expect a certain level of service, right? This may include speedy checkout in the 10-items-or-less express lane, for example.
He was in a hurry, and the lines were long everywhere and not moving. He guessed that everyone was doing their Saturday shopping at once, but the reality was that the computer servers were down and no one had made an announcement to the customers who were waiting. He eventually had to ask, and then he ultimately ended up leaving to get his items at another grocery store.
Expected Quality Category-Explicit expectations: Quick checkout in the express lane, fresh food, courteous staff…
Exciting Quality Category-Above and beyond: Free groceries, four-for-one specials, random cash awards of $X for the Xth customer who walks through the door…
So what are you doing to excite and delight your customers?
–Carol Dickson-Carr