This week´s
assignment:
1) Reflection of two sides of satisfaction; perception of quality and emotional
reactions, and relate this to how you view and work with customer satisfaction
in our business/organization.
2) Any lessons learned from the course yet?
1) Change of emotions
in the luxury bed linen store…
A couple of weeks ago me and my husband quite randomly went
into a store selling luxury beds, pillows, bed linen etc. after we saw the “SALE”
sign in the window. This is a store selling high quality brands and it´s generally
a bit too expensive for us, but since there was a sign with “Sale” we thought –
let´s see if we might find some nice bed linen for a reasonable price – maybe
we can make a good bargain! It was nothing that we urgently had a need of, it
was a more “nice to have”. Said and done , we went into the store and was
immediately welcomed by a young sales woman.
“Can I help you”? she asked.
“No thanks, we´re just looking”
“Is it something particular you are looking for”?
“No thanks, we´re just looking. Maybe some new bed linen, but we know what we
want when we see it”
“Ok”
Then she left us alone for approximately one minute and then started to follow
us around in the store… Absolutely, customer should be in focus but this girl
was a little bit too much and bit too pushy and didn´t really understood that
we would like to have a look by ourselves… Anyway, we tried a bed or two and
the girl said – “please let me educate you and show you the difference between
the different beds”.
Since we weren´t in a hurry and there were no other customers in the store we
said:
“ok, if you insist. But just so you know - we are not going to buy any bed today”
The girl started to show us the different beds, we must have
tried like 5-10 different ones. During the demonstration of the beds she asked
questions like: if you are going to buy a bed, how would you finance it? What
is the maximum amount of money you think you can put on a bed? Etc. etc. You
could notice that she had gone though a selling course and included in that was
a bit of customer mapping, to prepare for a sale. The thing was that we still
weren´t going to buy any bed... We told her that from the beginning and we
continued to include that in our answers on the questions – “WHEN we are going
to buy a bed, this bed would probably be the one we choose”, “WHEN we are going
to buy a bed we would probably pay cash” etc. etc.
The salesgirl didn´t seem to listen to these comments though
and when she started talking about choice of colour of the fabric and what colour
the legs of the bed should have I said to my husband – she really think we are
going to buy a bed today…
The girl finished the demonstration round saying – “please have a cup of tea or
coffee and I´ll come back to you in a minute”.
The salesgirl came back with some papers and showed us an
offer of a new continental bed with everything included and said “what do you
think of this price?”
Awkward situation….
I said, “a bit too expensive but that´s not really relevant because we are not
going to buy any bed today, as we said from the beginning”
The salesgirl says “I found out something good – I can make you a better price”
“OK, but we still are not going to buy any bed today…”
The girl said – “if you look at this offer, don´t look at the price – what is
preventing you to make this deal?”
As said – “we don´t need a bed as per today, and we are not buying any bed
today. This is a big investment, at least in this case. It´s not like going to
the store and buy a mascara… If you don´t give
them away of course, then we could of course reconsider”. J
The salesgirl´s attitude is now about to change and you can
see that she is really pissed: “you must have had some kind of thought to buy a
bed, otherwise you shouldn’t have kept me occupied (read: wasted my time) for
the last hour!”
Now I´m getting pissed to : “We said from the beginning that we are not
going to buy a bed today. We might buy a new bed when we are have
found and bought a new house.
We have also told you that from the beginning and numerous time during the
demonstration tour! And we did find the bed that we would like to have WHEN and
IF we are going to buy a bed. We came here to have a look at bed linen, that´s
all. We are not in the purchase mode to buy a new bed.”
You can imagine the awkward situation that follows… The salesgirl
was not happy, and neither were we… On
the way out we did buy some bed linen which was our intention from the
beginning but the positive and luxury feeling we expected to have when buying
these, was gone. What was added instead was a negative feeling…
As said – our mission and expectation from the beginning was to stroll around
in the store and hopefully find some high quality bed linen on sale. The
expectation was to get a bit of positive, luxury feeling since we were about to
buy and treat ourselves with some high quality linen that we don´t normally buy…
It ended up with something totally different – an awkward, strange, tense
situation with the pushy salesgirl… And we left the store with a feeling – we
will not go back to this store again!...
It´s a pity because it didn´t have to end this way at all! If the salesgirl had
listened to us and used a little bit of feeling and business intelligence the
situation could have been something totally different.
She could have said – “it was a pleasure showing you around and you are very
welcome back when it´s time for your purchase”. Then we should have had a
positive memory and that store would most likely be the first one that popped
up in our heads, when it´s time to buy a new bed. This store would have had an
advantage against others since they would have made the lobbying in a good way.
Instead they lost us as potential future customers. Only due to this inattentative
salesgirl unable to understand that were not in “purchase mode”. We will
probably not go there again. At least not if we don´t have to...
2) Any lessons learned from the course yet?
Absolutely! For example I didn´t know about the high/low expectation theory that
Tore Pedersen talked about.
= High expectations - even if the product/service is less good than you expected you will be
satisfied anyway
Low negative expectations -
even if the product/service perform better than you expected you will still not
be pleased
