That’s what Charles Orvis said - he who founded the legendary high-end fishing, hunting and outdoor retail and mail order business. Most of us have taken this pretty well for granted as the byword in customer service. Marketers worldwide have sought to meet what they think theirs customers want. If Fawlty Towers is the paradigm of how not to do it then Orvis is the complete opposite.
But then along came Steve Jobs to turn all the arguments on their heads with his refusal to do consumer research and with a fixed view on the need to create consumer needs rather than just fulfil them.
The trick is surely to give the customer what they hadn’t imagined they’d wanted but when they get it they realise it’s exactly what they wanted all along.
It’s the Heston Blumenthal trick.
Which brings me to NatWest. I bank with them and I like them. Their refurbished branch in Brighton is well run, smart and with bright and charming staff. (Yes boys and girls this is a a bank not a fairy story although being Brighton there are eccentrics around.)
Well they get a bit busy in there so they introduced a ticketing system whereby rather like in the delicatessen area of Waitrose you’d get say ticket 345 and seeing that there were 20 people ahead of you you’d go for a coffee, do some shopping and then come back and lo and behold you were now five away from the head of the queue. Great idea? Well they’ve canned it. The staff in the bank are disappointed because it made their life easier and more ordered and I am as mad as hell. Why did it go? “Customer survey,” I’m told “they did a survey and our customers didn’t like it”.
So Nat West has gone back to a system we all like – queuing in hope and ignorance in a long line.
Either the research methodology was wrong or they asked the wrong customers or they are lying and merely want us to give up and bank online.
I’d have asked the staff not the customer- day by day they feel the pulse of their customers. If the staff preferred the system that’s been abandoned maybe it was because they understood the effect it had on customer behaviour whilst the research only asked about customer attitude. Customer attitudes would, incidentally have shown that most people have been conditioned by the media, politicians and the economic crash to hate bankers. That’s their attitude towards them. This does not mean they want them to shut up shop and commit suicide.
In Room 101 recently Joan Bakewell said how she loathed customer surveys especially the kind that ask “were we good, very good or excellent?”
Agreed. But I’d go further. Most customer research perversely tells you the wrong things because (would you believe) customers don’t actually know what they want any more than patients in hospitals do.
Except to be made better and that’s our job.
Be nice to your customers, listen to them but be firm about giving them what they need (really, really need) not what they say they think they want.
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