subject: The importance of being 'expressive' [print this page] The importance of being 'expressive' The importance of being 'expressive'
The importance of being expressive'
Tony Scott explores how customers judge products, services and providers.
Customers do not usually have the inside knowledge to judge your competence in your own specialist field, any more than you are competent to assess, say, a pilot's flying skills. So they, like you, tend to judge the quality of other people's products and services on purely subjective grounds: Do I like the practical results? and Do I like dealing with this person/organisation?
Customer-care research suggests that managing a client's answers to these questions is both simpler and subtler than putting name badges on air stewardesses or teaching shop staff to say: Have a nice day.' Simpler because it doesn't involve learning a script. Subtler because it does rest on noticing and responding to what your customers are really feeling.
The key, according to the research, is to distinguish between expressive' and operational' behaviour.
Operational issues are those which occupy most organisations for most of the time. In an airline, for instance, they mean making sure the planes are airworthy, the food is hygienic and the pilots can fly. In an accountancy firm, they mean ensuring that tax advice is accurate, audited accounts are reliable, and reports are sent out with their pages in the right order.
The trouble is that clients take such things for granted. You wouldn't fly with an airline whose wings fell off the operational issues have to be right. But so long as the wings stay on, they have very little effect on your perception of the quality of service the airline provides.
Expressiveissues are those which do make a significant difference to the customer's perceptions often at minimal expense. A waitress who offers you your favourite drink, unprompted, on arrival in a restaurant. An airline which finds a novel left behind with a boarding card as bookmark, checks booking lists to discover that the passenger is flying home a week later, and passes the novel to the appropriate crew locker for return. A dentist who warns you that something is going to hurt.
The most powerful expressive behaviour addresses a client's natural but often unspoken concerns. When a motorist delivers his car to a garage, for instance, often his major worry is that he will be kept in the dark about what's being done to his car (and so he might be cheated). One UK exhaust specialist, Kwikfit, trains its mechanics to show the motorist his car once it's up on a hoist, to explain exactly what needs replacing and to ask for authority to go ahead.
Most audit clients worry about nasty surprises that the audit might uncover. So one senior audit partner in London makes a point of visiting the Finance Director of each of his major clients two months before the year-end, to hand over a hired mobile phone and a piece of paper. The paper has the ex-directory number of the partner's mobile phone and the FD is invited to use it day or night until the audit is complete. The cost to the audit firm: negligible. The impact on the FD: huge.
Finding out what clients really, really want in this context is not difficult, but it's very rarely done. When it is done, the results can be surprisingly powerful, as the Finance Director of a chain of private UK hospitals once explained to me. Given that his major competitor the NHS was free, his organisation put huge effort into finding out what its patients valued. So initially the firm collected vast amounts of data from long questionnaires of the form: How clean was your ward (score 1-5)? How helpful were your nurses (score 1-5)? Was your operation completed on time (score 1-5)?'
It took them two years, said the FD, to understand that the numbers told them nothing they could do anything with, and that they needed better questions. Mostly, that meant asking questions without preconceptions along the lines of What do we do well/ badly?' and fleshing out the answers by asking for detailed anecdotal examples of each comment. The most useful question of all, he found, was what he called a perception-shifter: If you were put in charge of this hospital tomorrow, what would you change?'
The FD went on to describe a string of unexpected ideas generated by the question. Among them, patients saying: The corridors in the hospital are very clean, but they're also a little bleak. Wouldn't it be nice to have a few vases of flowers.' And: When I'm here as a patient, I'm wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown, and carrying no money. So my visitors have to pay for tea and coffee (from the machines at the end of every ward). And I find that embarrassing. Wouldn't it be nice if the machines were free.'
In both examples, as with the audit partner's mobile phone, the cost of introducing the changes was trivial. The perceived value to the customers: huge.
Why it matters
Acting expressively towards clients does more than keep them very happy, it turns out. The US-based PIMS database confirms that organisations which score well on expressive measures can charge up to 50 per cent more than their rivals without losing market share. In addition, firms in the top third of the expressive league earn twice as much profit as firms in the bottom third. And they grow twice as fast.
