WOW?

Some people claim that the key to earning loyalty is to WOW your customers. I don’t know about you but to me that language seems a little bit over the top. “WOW” sounds like a mantra from some pop-culture guru, not a serious business proposition. And yet any company implementing NPS must find a way to convert customers into promoters. This usually requires doing something noteworthy—something so surprising that customers take notice and talk about it to others.

Why so? Isn’t it enough to remove defects and consistently satisfy customers? Given the way the human brain is engineered, unfortunately, there is a good chance that customers will come to expect that flawless execution—and hardly notice it. With so much data pouring in from our five senses, the only way our brains can cope is to rely on pattern recognition. Instead of registering every bit of data, the brain simplifies its processing requirements by recognizing patterns. Then it can attend to other issues, paying little attention to individual bits of data or events—unless they are inconsistent with the pattern.

So if the customer’s experience fits a perfectly predictable pattern—perfect, that is, from the perspective of a zero-defects engineer—it is probably boringly predictable to the customer and will therefore be ignored. That raises the bar. To create promoters, companies must not only minimize errors, they must also innovate. They must break out of the pattern that their customers’ brains have come to expect.

The New York Times recently ran an article about some research on successful relationships. A leading social scientist who had been observing marriages concluded that for continued harmony, a spouse needs to positively surprise his or her partner an average of five times for every disappointment. I’m not sure if this 5:1 ratio is the same for successful long-term business relationships, but it makes sense that we need to provide positive surprises for customers far more often than we disappoint them. And given that we are all human, we will certainly deliver negative surprises upon occasion no matter how much we work toward zero defects.

So finding innovative (and economical) ways to delight customers is a vital process for earning loyalty and creating promoters. But is it wise to refer to this core process as WOW? Doesn’t this serious idea deserve more serious language? A quick poll at our last meeting of the NPS Loyalty Forum (a group of NPS practitioners that meets quarterly to share best practices and solve implementation challenges) identified a range of different labels they use for WOW customer experiences: positive outlier, differentiated, premium value, extraordinary, delightful, remarkable, noteworthy…..the list goes on.

I wonder which of these names does the best job of capturing the essential idea. Maybe the name is inconsequential. But naming things implies a taxonomical hierarchy of relationships. This framework then underpins the creation of knowledge. For example, scientific progress in biology didn’t take off until Linnaeus created a process to assign a single name for each species. Would the six sigma process quality efforts have achieved such powerful reductions in error rates if the program had instead been labeled OOPS? WOW just might lack the gravitas required to achieve serious management attention. We can’t afford to let this vital process get pigeonholed as vacuous marketing-speak. I would welcome comments from any netpromoter.com community members who have suggestions regarding the best language for labeling this process for generating the positive surprises required to create promoters.

Comments

[Zane Safrit]

Yes. WOW is a pop culture-ish phrase. But, at a glance "You've Got to WOW Your Customers" is understood by its readers, regardless of background or expertise or industry or education or profession, gender, parenthood...

Having said that, the understanding at that point is intuitive, 'got-it'...let's move on.

It's those next steps that make it a reality. And for me, that's what you're imploring.

"Let's get real, now." Let's delve deeply into this thing called "wowing the customer" so we can fully understand it and how it applies to our cusotmers and do it right, give it the dignity it deserves, we deserve as consumers and the people charged with delivering a wow to our customers.

[Michael Caito]

Hi Frank,

We don't have fancy names for this, we just try and have good systems that deliver a predictable experience for the customer. Empowering our people allows them to create the "wow" factor when it presents itself.

Thanks for your insights.

Michael Caito
CEO, Restaurants on the Run
www.rotr.com

[bob broderick]

I'm a retired six sigma black belt who now works part time at the profitable Trader Joe grocery store. They talk about the "wow" factor and are constantly adding new unique grocery products. Also, the employees are very customer service oriented.
Wow seems to appropriate in this model.

[Colin Brogan]

In my experience, WOW offerings usually fall into two categories: they either a) are tailored to my specific, expressed needs or b) are responsive to some unexpressed need. In the first category are one-to-one experiences that make my life easier, such as online shopping sites that store my information and make transactions faster. In the latter category are meta experiences that help customers accomplish their overall goal - such as the Apple store's Genius Bar (an overused example)
or children's entertainment in our favorite grocery store (Stew Leonard's). The trick is to understand the underlying customer need and find creative ways to help them accomplish their goals.

[Mark Price]

While WOW may sound like a catch phase (and actually be one), when you are socializing a concept across a large organization, a marketing-like approach is often necessary. This is particularly true for my clients with seasonal customer-facing help, who need to quickly introduce a compelling approach to meet or exceed customer expectations.

[Mark Gregory]

WOW gets a message across but for many front line staff removing defects first is far more relevant so that customers first get what they were supposed to get, without having to make sacrifices for an organisation's shortfalls.

Understanding the meaning of WOWing customers we find is easy for employees to grasp, after all they are someone elses customers, but it can often be misused and over stated. We prefer the use of AOK. In order to go the extra mile there are three essentials - Attitude, Observation (looking out for the opportunity) and Know How (of how to make use of the opportunity and positively surprise the customer). Unless you have enough of all three you can never deliver the WOW (or whatever you call it).

Whether we choose an alternative to WOW or not the key thing for employees, leaders and their organisation to recognise is what's the level of AOK displayed.

Long live AOK!