A Mercer

commentary

Keeping the customer (profitably) satisfied

Which is more enlightened: the company that cuts costs across the board

during the downturn, not knowing the impact on customer satisfaction; or

the company that confidently spends whatever it takes to keep satisfaction

scores high?

Neither. What both companies must do is to understand, and selectively

invest in, the particular aspects of their service that drive customers’

repurchase. The goal must be to link customer satisfaction to sustained

profit growth.

© Copyright 2002, Mercer Management Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved.

 Finding the satisfaction that matters

How good should an airline meal be?

If you are guided by customer satisfaction, the answer is: very. Airline customers
often complain about food, and criticise it in customer satisfaction questionnaires.

However, customers don’t buy airline meals; they buy airline tickets. And tickets
give them a bundle of service features, including check-in service, cabin service,
food, in-flight movies, seating, and timely arrival. Some of these features influence
a customer’s choice of airline much more than others. If providing a better meal
has little effect on whether a customer will purchase again from the airline, what
is the return on investing in better food?

Many products and services look much like the airline ticket: they are bundles of
features, some of which influence customers more than others (Exhibit 1). The
complexity of these bundled purchases usually gives managers an opportunity to
save cost, if they can work out which features to cut back on without affecting
customer behaviour. But like a game of Jenga or pick-up sticks, taking out the
wrong piece will bring down the whole structure.

Exhibit 1: Services chosen as

Customer chooses: Customer experiences:
bundles provide
opportunities for
Airline ticket Check-in service, cabin service, food, in-flight movies, punctuality, seating…
optimisation
Supermarket Product quality, choice, check-out speed, store appearance, special offers...
TV cable package Bouquet of different channels, each presenting a mix of individual programmes
Mobile phone Handset utility, activation, network performance, billing, customer care…
Theme park Ticketing, rides, queues, eating places, grounds, entertainment…
Credit card Credit limit requests, disputed charges, debt collection, fraud controls...

The challenge, then, is to understand the subtleties of how customers’ satisfaction

with each of the different features influences their overall purchase behaviour.
Most customer satisfaction programmes don’t focus on that. Instead, they build up
and monitor an aggregate customer satisfaction index. Such indices are well
regarded when they go up - though even then they confirm only that a company is
spending money effectively, not that it is doing so efficiently. But when the
satisfaction indices go down, they offer few clues about what actions a company
should take.

One obstacle to spotting the opportunities is a natural desire to simplify the

problem. If as a customer you try to terminate your mobile phone service, your
provider will typically ask why you are leaving. They will code your response as
one of five to ten standard reasons, such as a better deal, dissatisfaction with
network performance, customer service problems, or a phone upgrade. They will
then produce internal reports about why people are leaving, so that they can focus
the company’s satisfaction efforts. But most customers don’t have a single reason
for leaving. The different possible sources of dissatisfaction are like the risk
factors for heart disease: over an entire population, you can talk meaningfully
about the contribution that each factor makes statistically, but you can’t
pronounce on the single factor that was decisive for each individual.

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 If aggregate indices hide the effects we are looking for, and oversimplification
distorts the picture, how can companies get a clear picture of what drives the
satisfaction that matters, so that they can redirect their investments to increase
repurchase?

New insights from old research

In some cases, companies may already be sitting on all the data they need.
Returning to the case of the airline above, this company was looking to prioritise
its spending across the different aspects of its service. The airline’s traditional way
of thinking was influenced by its organisation, which was structured by function:
the seating people understood priorities in seating, the catering people understood
priorities in food. Nobody could make objective trade-offs among these areas in
order to decide how to prioritise spending.

For several years the airline had been monitoring customer satisfaction using a
questionnaire that passengers completed during their flights. The airline had been
learning from the questionnaire operationally, again by function: the seating people
looked at satisfaction with seating, and so on.

Hidden within these questionnaire answers were valuable insights about the
drivers of overall satisfaction and of customers’ intent to repurchase. Factor
analysis of the raw data from 1,500 questionnaires allowed us to quantify
statistically how important customers’ stated satisfaction with each product and
service feature (such as seating, cabin crew or entertainment) is in influencing their
overall intent to repurchase from the airline. Combining this analysis with the
airline’s relative performance in each feature, from an industry questionnaire
conducted across different airlines, we could for the first time identify in which
areas incremental investment would have the biggest business impact (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2: Factor analysis of Performance Gap Feature Impact on

an airline’s in-flight vs. Competitor A Stated Repurchase
questionnaire reveals the
experiences that drive Seating Invest to win
repurchase, suggesting
investment priorities
Cabin Crew Catch up

Entertainment Invest to win

Punctuality

Cabin
environment Economise?

Food service Economise?

Check-in

-0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0 0.2 0.4 0.6

Difference in performance score Impact on repurchase score (1-5 scale)

(Positive = better than competitor) from a 1-point improvement in
(1-3 scale) satisfaction with individual feature

Note: sequence of service features has been

changed to protect client confidentiality

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 Of course, focusing on customers’ stated intent to repurchase is not enough. What
matters is what customers will actually do, not what they say they will do, and so it
is important to quantify the link back to real revenue. For our airline this link was
difficult to measure directly, because we were focusing on passengers in the
Economy cabin, where repurchase cycles are long. But by analysing different
routes and periods of time we did quantify a correlation between changes in the
stated intent-to-repurchase score, and changes in the airline’s market share
(relative to its share of capacity on the route). This analysis both validated the
measures we were using, and allowed us to estimate what the revenue impact
would be of lifting satisfaction in each of the different product features.

In industries with a shorter repurchase interval it becomes possible to quantify the

revenue impact more directly. Customers visiting the supermarket illustrated in
Exhibit 3 returned once a week on average, and we were able to establish that the
customer satisfaction score correlated well with the sales level. Like the airline,
this supermarket also had detailed, historic operational surveys of customer
satisfaction that we could re-analyse. With these data, we could quantify the
increase in like-for-like sales that would result from measurable improvements in
customers’ satisfaction with each aspect of the overall shopping experience.

As a result, investment can be shifted towards activities that have a major impact
on customer behaviour, but which are often under-funded because it is difficult to
justify a business case by traditional means. For example, traditional approaches
often focus on levers that are easy to measure, such as price and product choice.
Understanding the drivers of customer satisfaction allows businesses to trade off
investment in these levers against investment in less tangible customer perceptions,
such as product quality and customer service. Our analyses in several projects
across different industries have justified big increases in customer service training.

Exhibit 3: For a supermarket,

correlating the stated
satisfaction score with
revenue quantifies the
benefits of improvements.

Quantified relationship between overall Sales increase per m2 from a 1-point

satisfaction score and revenue improvement in satisfaction with each feature

Store
environment

Check-out service

Customer Product quality

satisfaction
score
Product availability

Prices and
Promotions

Ease of shopping

0 0.05 0.1 0.15

Deseasonalised sales/square metre Coefficients

Note: sequence of service features has been

changed to protect client confidentiality

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 Tailoring for different customer groups

The analysis described above generates simple, high-level results directly from
detailed data at the level of individual customers, without intermediate steps of
aggregation or averaging. This transparency allows managers to cut the analysis in
different ways to look at sub-categories of customers: those flying on certain
routes, or on night flights, or flying for business rather than leisure.

In the retail world, these analyses show that the importance of each aspect of the
customer offer is different in different stores, driven by the segments of customers
who live locally and the mindset (or ‘mission’) in which the customers shop in the
store. Stores can be correspondingly grouped into different retailing formats
(Exhibit 4). Stores with format A serve relatively quality-sensitive customers; for
them, return on investment will be maximised through high levels of satisfaction,
particularly for aspects such as product presentation and store appearance. Stores
with format B serve more price-sensitive customers; here, returns are maximised
through lower levels of satisfaction in the quality side of the offer, and more money
invested in improving the customers’ price perception through pricing, promotions
and communications.

Exhibit 4: To maximise return Optimum score

on investment, a retail chain (relative to norm)
must manage different stores
for different profiles of
customer satisfaction

Format A

Product Prices Check-out Store

quality service environment

Format B

Product Prices Check-out Store

quality service environment

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Acting on the insights

How should managers use these new insights into which aspects of customer
satisfaction drive customers’ repurchase behaviour?

First, there are some straightforward quick wins. Once you know how good an
airline meal should be, or for how long you should ask customers to queue for a
supermarket check-out or a ride in a theme park, you can set resource levels
accordingly, shifting spend from lower- to higher-impact activities. Where raw
data for analysis exists, these quick wins can be achieved in just four to five weeks.
The quick wins can reduce costs by identifying the Jenga piece that you can pull
out without damage; they can also save your business, by preventing you from
pulling out a piece that would collapse the tower.

To capitalise fully on the findings over time requires generating a continuous flow
of such insights, which means moving from analysis of past customer behaviour to
experimenting with, and predicting, future customer behaviour. This, in turn,
requires institutionalising a culture of continuously testing customer response and
then using what you learn to take actions that optimise the economics of the
business as a whole.

The difference between ‘mining’ past behaviour and ‘testing’ future behaviour is
significant. Deliberately designing in-market experiments (e.g. increasing or
lowering queue size, altering telephone operator ‘scripts’, varying promotion
conditions) allows you to attribute differences in response to quite complex
combinations of stimuli. By creating a rapid cycle of in-market testing, where the
results from one cycle of tests shape the next, you constantly adapt what gets
tested and what gets learnt. Your understanding of how to optimise your treatment
of customers goes on growing.

Continuous learning in this way delivers two benefits. It provides rapid feedback
from the market, allowing you to detect the influence of shifting customer
behaviours, attitudes and the effect of competitors’ actions. While market research
swiftly becomes dated, constantly testing in the market keeps you ahead of the
game. It is also reveals a stream of new ways to generate economic value through
changing the customer experience, moving from quick hits to sustained value
generation.

To realise this greater scale of value generation means institutionalising the testing
and decision-making, based on the sort of holistic, economic optimisation
described. That in turn requires a degree of operational co-ordination and co-
operation among functions that does not exist in most organisations. It depends on
working approaches, tools and skills that support the increased complexity of
cross-business research, testing and decision-making based on economic value. It
is not a question of setting a target for each function and asking the functions to
maximise their performance, because that would not address the cross-functional
trade-offs. Instead, senior management must inform, guide, and fund each function
to invest in strong performance only where the economic returns merit doing so.

Measuring the effectiveness of spend in terms of its impact on customer behaviour

is the starting point. Organisations must then use this information to trade off
competing investments from the different functional areas that contribute to the
customer experience, in order to maximise the value from the customer overall.

It may be tempting to address this problem by creating a ‘customer-led’

organisation, shifting responsibilities away from classic functions to teams focused

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cross-functionally on particular customer groups. But simply re-orienting the
organisation can create as many problems as it solves, by fragmenting the
responsibility for functional delivery and causing operational inefficiencies. This is
a matrix problem, one of optimising the application of different functions to
different customer groups. And although a highly matrixed organisation may be
unattractive as a solution, it is still worth recognising the problem as a matrix
problem. The preferred solution will differ by company and situation, but will be
more about developing new skills, capabilities, and processes than about any
particular organisation structure.

If this degree of implementation complexity seems off-putting, then stick with the
quick wins. And by then you will know, quantitatively, whether institutionalising
the approach is worth the effort.

Simon Glynn is a vice president in Mercer’s Communications, Information and

Entertainment group. Ewan Jones is a principal in Mercer’s Retail, Consumer and
Healthcare group. Both are based in London.

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Further information For more information related to this Commentary, please contact one of the following
Mercer Management Consulting partners:

Simon Glynn, London, 44/ 20 7915 9229, simon.glynn@mercermc.com

Ewan Jones, London, 44/ 20 7915 9352, ewan.jones@mercermc.com

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