Malcolm Pitcher

Blind faith
It has been said that blindly fulfilling customer requirements has a lot of risk associated with it. On either side of the rather old-fashioned opinion of "ask the customers what they want and give it to them" lie two dark canyons. One is called givens, the other delighters - ignore one and you can still satisfy, ignore the other and you may as well invite in Watchdog.

When you pick up the phone and you immediately get a dial tone you don't even think about it. But if you pick up the phone and there is no dial tone at all you are likely to become very angry, very quickly. The phone company may well be verbally abused at the top of your voice and the poor phone itself may well find itself flying across your office at speed.

A dial tone is something so simple yet so essential. When it is present we are satisfied, when it is not we are dissatisfied. And yet stop 1000 people in the street and ask them what they want from their phone company and not one will tell you that they want a dial tone.

What we are talking about here is an expected requirement and our daily lives are full of them. Ask yourself, did you ever tell anyone how delighted you were that your new car was clean when you took delivery of it or that your washing machine actually worked when you plugged it in or - need I go on?

But now ask yourself how you would have felt if the car had been filthy and the damned washing machine had refused to spark into life. These expecteds are fundamental to delivering customer satisfaction yet in market research they are often not mentioned at all. They are only noticed or remembered when they are not present.

Take a look at your own customer care statistics and complaints letters. I'm pretty sure you will confirm that most of them are about the house not being clean, or about things not working properly or about the fact that it was not finished on the day the customer took possession.

I would guess that very few letters are complaining about that great new marketing initiative you have recently thought up, the aim of which is to positively delight your customers. Such delighters or unexpecteds play quite a different role in the satisfaction stakes.

It was a leading customer satisfaction researcher Dr Noriaki Kano who first attempted to bring a new dimension to the understanding and measurement of customer satisfaction. The Kano model described three different types of customer requirement namely: expected, requested and unexpected. Or put another way: must be, more is better and delighters.

It is the requested items that come up most often in market research. We all have an opinion of what we want in a product or service. Generally the more we get of what we want the more satisfied we are. As long as the expecteds are delivered!

Examples of requesteds or "more is better" are the acceleration of a car, the spin speed of a washing machine or the storage space in a new home.

Delighters are things not expected by the customer. When they are present they delight but when they are not the customer feels neutral because in fact the customer did not expect them in the first place. The challenge we face is that because they don't expect them customers cannot describe them so again classic market research may not be of much help.

Recent examples of delighters include air conditioning as standard on most cars, the introduction of DVD, the networking of new homes or the latest options packages offered by several builders. Of course the challenge with delighters is that once commonplace they become expecteds.

So what is all this leading to? Well, like you I am becoming more and more excited by the new things that housebuilders are trying in order to differentiate or delight.

But before delight we must first achieve satisfaction and the route to delivering a bedrock of customer satisfaction lies first in your ability to meet your customer expecteds. No amount of new ideas or initiatives aimed at delighting the customer is going to overcome the sheer disgust of completing on an unclean or unfinished new home.

So, in my book the priorities for any housebuilder are, in order of importance: Create basic satisfaction - Deliver all the expecteds - all of the time. Finish your homes on time and deliver them in a clean and fully working condition.

Build on this satisfaction and move towards delight - Create homes with maximum performance for example, in terms of space utilisation.

Then delight them with that great big unexpected differentiating thing. I do fear that some builders may be spending too much time thinking the other way around.