Managing customer dissatisfaction: turning lemons into lemonades

*MASOKO MASOKO H | Thursday November 1, 2007 00:00

Complaints of poor service delivery, unwelcoming attitudes, preferential customer treatment, and the ironical national productivity level of 25 percent against the international benchmark of 75 percent are but common features of our mundane individual and organised lives. Companies, which do not embrace the ideals and virtues of good customer service by not committing themselves to an annual Customer Satisfaction Index, are counted out of the rat race for productivity improvement. However, despite all these initiatives and passionate reforms, customer dissatisfaction and low productivity remain every investor's primary concern.

At this juncture, judging by known and unknown cases, reality is beginning to knock on the door of the traditional 'Customer Satisfaction Approach'; rather than improving service delivery and enhancing client satisfaction; it achieves the opposite effect of entrenching embedded negative attitudes and watering the tree of complacency.

The approach encourages practitioners to take particular interest in the good news about their service culture as opposed to the bad news. By using customer satisfaction indices, I am convinced that we are chasing the wrong goal.

This is the reason and philosophy behind the Customer Dissatisfaction Approach.

Dissatisfaction has a rapid impact on the bottom line and has the miraculous effect of nipping undesirable behaviour in the bud through some form of caricature rewards. When used correctly, it can provide a reliable pointer to grey performance areas.

Most management approaches and performance improvement initiatives perpetuate the thesis that to eliminate negative service attitudes one needs to accentuate the positives. This justifies the usage of factors/variables such as customer satisfaction levels as performance measures. We are used to conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys when the real problems besetting our organisations are customer dissatisfaction. It is common to meet employees and managers who own their jobs to the point of thinking that customers are an added stress to their 'hectic schedules'; they shout at customers, both internal and external, they control certain work processes that amount to red tape and create a buffer zone that serves to insulate themselves from customers thus, creating a negative culture of performance. Yet, at the end of the month or at the end of the year when good performers are rewarded with flashy Employee of the Year Awards, the bad performers and service freaks are left outside.

I believe, if we could also reward them with some caricatured wet blanket award; if we could identify them from within our midst and honour them with the Customer Harassment Award, we can make a hell of a difference in service improvement. I believe if we thank such people for harassing our customers and keeping us out of business, reality will dawn on them, helping them to change their negative attitudes in the process.

It is a fact of life that nobody would like to receive such kind of an award because naturally human beings have a tendency to like and love to be appreciated and showered with praises in order to improve their motivation levels, and have a serious aversion for criticism in a formal corporate milieu.

Within this context therefore, it could be argued that organizations that focus more on improving satisfaction levels are not and will not be effective at eliminating poor service cultures because satisfaction is felt by customers at the receiving end and is not within the purview and control of the service provider. It would be better if we were to focus on dissatisfaction because it is within our control as service providers. In the same token, the Employee of the Month Award that is given to good performers has had little, if any, impact on behaviour reinforcement and does not trickle down to the entire workforce.

There are also cases of politics in the workplace as managers use their position power to determine who gets what, when and how. Thus the good performer awards become pawns that are moved horizontally and vertically on the managerial chessboard.

Nowadays in Botswana, poor service and customer dissatisfaction are an expectation.

*Benefits of the Customer Dissatisfaction Approach
There is a plethora of benefits that could be derived from using a Customer Dissatisfaction Index (CDI) over the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) but due to the circumscriptions of time and space, I would just list a few for rumination:

* It incrementally reduces resistance to change by focusing on the negatives.

*It shifts the locus of change from the systems and process level to the job-performer level.

* It shows the public how badly the organisation is faring; and thus is an Important factor in reinforcing customer 'fears' about the organisation.

* It creates an internal fear based sense of urgency on the part of individual service providers by putting them in the spot light.

* By stigmatising poor service delivery and accentuating excellence, it is a better way of helping employees to unlearn dissatisfying service.

* It is a clear indicator of which companies to work for and which businesses to invest in.
lUnlike the CSI, which measures the symptoms and not the causes, CDI measures the cause by focusing on the dissatisfaction level, which is a sure progressive way of advancement through introspection. 

'What lies before us (satisfaction) is not  as important as what lies within us (dissatisfaction). It shows us exactly what the problem is, where it lies and in the same token, guides us to craft lasting solutions.

Lastly, albeit not least, most organisations have unattended suggestion boxes that never help to improve performance because they are modelled on principles that are inward looking and designed to enthuse the service provider, rather than help them change their attitudes to customer, As I opined earlier, they entrench negative attitudes by accentuating the positives.

Like Albert Einstein has rightly observed, 'the significant problems we face today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking as when we created them, so there is need for paradigm shift'. I believe it is about time we change our attitudes to satisfaction by focusing on eliminating negativity. In that way, we will start to see a whole brave new world unfolding because we will see the need to turn the lemons of dissatisfaction into lemonades of satisfaction.

*H Masoko Masoko is a practicing Human Capital Management Consultant and Managing Director of Potential Unlimited Services, and can be reached for comments at explodepotential@yahoo.com.