Do you remember that horrible prank bullies played on weaker kids where they would twist your arm until you shamefully cried “UNCLE, UNCLE !” .

I just found an older post form The Bank Channel which reminded me of that.

Although insightful it brings to light issues in banking that make my head shake uncontrollably.

Here is a quote from the first paragraph:

“Nearly 60% of customers of the 10 largest retail banks indicate high levels of satisfaction with their primary bank – but fewer than 40% of these same customers believe their banks meet their expectations of what a bank should do for them.” (The rest of the post is here – it has lots of good areas and thoughts on where we can put our attention.)

I think this is the first time I have seen this phenomenon outside of government services, where the lack of customer satisfaction has beat the customers into submission and acceptance. Sixty percent of the customers are satisfied but less than 40% of these feel their expectations are being met. What?

I wonder if we hold banks to a different standard?

It’s possible, because if a car company were to mail my son the keys to a car he could not afford I would be much more upset than I am when he receives unsolicited credit cards he can’t afford.

Although the posting is quite interesting (Kudos to our friends at McKinsey), I wish they could have been a little less politically correct and called it like it is: “Shame on you Mr. Big Bank, that you have convinced the consuming public that less than they expect is the best you could or should do.

This past week, we looked into a customer’s case that couldn’t seem to find a resolution through the normal channels.

The string of emails went back at least a week and finally, reached me with the request . . . . Please decide if we should allow X or if we should not allow X? Although tempted to make an immediate decision we decided to ask for clarification. We called a few people and got enough information to lead us to our billing department. After 5 minutes in billing, it became clear that the customer request would not be possible based on the structure of the account in the system. To meet the customer’s needs we could change the structure of the account. We spoke to accounting and ensured the findings were correct and the proposed solution would be acceptable. We called those making the request on behalf of the customer and reported our finding. Total time, 20 minutes, 2 phone calls.

So, what caused this issue to take over a week?

Lack of depth in the intention to reach a true solution.

In spite of the 7 people that touched this customer issue, none of them went deep enough to find solid clues that would help in the determination of the next step. Instead, most people were accepting other people’s ideas as to the potential cause or problem. I heard that Mr. X said, I think I saw an email that said you can’t do that. Because no one actually had hard facts, everyone in the chain was making assumptions as to why the problem existed and how it could be fixed. The result was at least 4 fictitious solutions for problems that didn’t necessarily exist and a lot of “he said, she said” – The broken telephone game – remember?

When boiled down I can see lack of ownership at each step. Ownership doesn’t mean one has to solve the problem alone. It means that we have to be committed to finding, verifying and questioning facts in order to find the root cause and thereby a potential solution. We have to be willing to push through the quagmire of policy, process and educated guesses until the root cause surrenders “white flag” and all.

Then, and only then, will most reasonable rational management be willing to take action in changing policy or process.

Ownership means having the tenacity to find the root cause.

This post is in response to Chris’ comment regarding the power in turning dissatisfied customers into extremely satisfied ones.

Our research shows that recovery is the most powerful driver to XCS (Repurchase propensity of 89%). It is more powerful than the effort of creating XCS with a customer who hasn’t had a poor experience (Repurchase propensity 76%).

The phenomenon is powered by the same engine as XCS, emotional events. Since a dissatisfied customer is more emotionally charged than a person who has not had a problem, and since the recovery is often unexpected, the resulting positive emotional charge is greater.

The problem is that extremely dissatisfied customers are usually relatively small in numbers. So, if we’re searching for large gains in loyalty, then probably dissatisfied customer is not the place. However, knowing this characteristic is HUGE.

This is not to say that we should look for ways of dissatisfying customers so we can then save them, but is good to know that in every dissatisfied customer is a loyal customer looking to break through.

See a white paper on recovery, here: servicefailureandrecovery.pdf