Module 2 Psycological aspects - Week 2

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