Heavy cutlery: a hidden source of customer satisfaction
The conventional ways we go about understanding customers and the causes of their satisfaction fails to grasp an uncomfortable truth: customers can’t tell you what makes them satisfied. This is because the act of trying to rationalise an experience only accesses their conscious mind, leaving the unconscious one unexplored. This is like interpreting the world using 5% of your brain
Two groups of people recently went to the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Edinburgh for a three course meal. But despite having eaten exactly the same dishes, the two groups reported significant variance in their experience, in particular, their ‘liking’ of the food, its aesthetic value and how much they were willing to pay. This experiment was conducted by the University Of Oxford (isn’t it great to hear about a UK rather than a US piece of research) who reported their findings in Jul,y 2015. What researchers did was to vary the presentation of the starter (to the side or centred), the weight of cutlery used for the main (heavy and light) and the colour and shape of the plates used for the dessert (black square plates or white round ones). And it turns out that all three variables influenced the diners’ experiences, with heavy cutlery (vs lighter cutler) in particular having a marked effect on satisfaction of the main course (they liked it 10% better) and willingness to pay (prepared to pay 15% more).
Understanding customer satisfaction is much more complex than we think. Research methods in this field are generally unhelpful at pinpointing how to improve experiences. Net Promoter scores in my opinion are only useful ways to measure performance improvements over time and for competitor comparisons. What they don’t tell you is why customers feel the way they do. That requires us to take a completely different approach to understanding customers, something which most organisations fail to understand. Bt when you do, you are far better able to engage with others.
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