Quality & Improvement: From “Experience” to “Advocacy”
Tanmay Vora
Consider the following scenario:
You go to a new restaurant for the first time. You evaluate quality of food and quality of service. Your first visit was about experimenting with a new place and getting an experience.
A few weeks later, you go there again. You get a similar or a better experience this time. They have added a few new items to their menu. Service is better too. You loved their Italian Pizza. You now believe and trust that this restaurant is really good.
The third visit a few months later, you again get a similar or better experience. New recipes on the offer. The service staff is even more cordial. The ambience, decor has improved. You again ordered their specialized Italian Pizza. After this visit, you are now a “loyal” customer. Every time you want to eat that special Pizza, you visit the same restaurant.
Beyond this point, you start advocating this restaurant to your friends for specialized Italian Pizza. You recommend their food, service, ambience and overall quality. You become an evangelist.
Now think about your organization. How many customers are still experiencing you. How many of them really believe in you. How many customers are loyal? Do they advocate your services to others?
A common mistake organizations commit is to deliver great experience first time and then take the customer for granted. The moment there is someone else who is better and delivers a higher quality experience, a customer is lost!
So, quality is a moving target – each time a customer comes back to you, you need to deliver similar or better quality (of products, services and experience), you need to demonstrate improvement, care enough about them, stay on top of market trends and keep changing the rules of the game (innovation). When you consistently focus on delivering value, your customers move higher up in the value pyramid from “experience” to ‘belief & trust” to “loyalty” to “advocacy”.
Delivering great experiences through people, processes and leadership comes with a cost, but that cost is far less than the cost of losing a customer and then acquiring a new one all over again.
Note: My book ‘#QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to deliver quality in every project’ explores the people, process and leadership aspects to build a constantly improving organization culture. Check it out if you haven’t already!
Liked the simple and easily understandable restaurant reference to make the point very clear. Its perpetual and continuous improved quality what makes the customers return to you. Its more of commitment towards evolving and learning everyday to improve and to serve better.
@Anand – Thanks, and am glad you liked the reference. I have realized that it is no longer enough to just have a good product (though that is absolutely necessary), you need to constantly strive to deliver better experiences.
Thanks for the comment!
Best,
Tanmay
Again good learning ! Quality in your each and every task whether at your company or at your home are required and the improvement day by day in it is the added value. Change is Obvious and we will have to accept it. A very easy example for understanding and implementing the “Quality” term. 🙂
Thanks a lot!
Megha
@Megha – Thanks for the comment and continued support to the blog.
Have a great day!
Best,
Tanmay
WOW, I simply liked this post for 2 reasons: 1) something on Quality Delivery, 2) example of restaurant, because I simply love trying new restaurants 😉
Very rightly conveyed that Quality is never a destination, it’s always a journey.
But sometimes what happens in case of long engagement between a company (or restaurant) and client (food lover) is that serving with same standards would not be all enough. Quality and delivery standards needs to be importantly increased / improved rather than maintaining same level for longer period.
Mobile service providers seems to be coming up with such improvements / innovative offers, periodically to sustain loyalty of customers. Hence to make success a habit and sustain belief/trust/advocacy it is absolutely necessary to be hungry for Quality Improvements.
Thanks Tanmay for wounderful explanation!
Regards,
Jay Chhaya
@Jay – Thanks again. With rapid changes and innovation in marketplace, if you keep delivering consistent levels of quality, you soon become boring. It is easy to fall in trap of compliance to standard processes and get boring. When you innovate, try new things, deliver better experiences and surprise your customers from time to time, you remain interesting – and in that process, you increase your value adds. We are in business because we deliver “value” – and value needs to constantly go up, else the engagement goes down.
Best,
Tanmay
Nice post and a simple and superb way of explaining the definition of Quality by providing a classic example of Restaurant scenario. While reading I recalled one of your tweet “Quality is never a short-term goal. It is a long-term differentiators”.
This post explains us to improve step by step (“experience” to ‘belief & trust” to “loyalty” to “advocacy”) to accomplish in having quality, trust, relation.
Thanks heaps for this wonderful Wednesday post 🙂
–Anil Kumar
@Anil – Thanks Anil – for the comment and for pointing to the tweet. Yes, quality is a long term goal that requires discipline over a period of time. All improvements are about change – in habits and in culture. Both take time, and hence quality and improvements should be treated as an “investment” and not as a “cost”.
Best,
Tanmay
true, I always tell my friends “for best pizzas – go to Papa Jones” – and i wonder how many of them “ADVOCATE” Papa-Jones. May be thats how they became the best.
Again a great post and great example.
My Twitter update – When you consistently focus on delivering value, your customers move higher up in the value pyramid from “experience 2 advocacy”.
@Ajay – With advent of social media, people now have easier ways to spread the word. If you do great, that spreads fast. But if you do a lousy job at customer service, it spreads even faster. All great brands I know have grown “one-word-of-mouth” at a time.
Thanks for comment and the Twitter RT.
Best,
Tanmay