As the saying goes, \u201cyou can\u2019t judge a book by its cover\u201d \u2026 but that is precisely what we do as consumers every day.\u00a0 Whether it is judging the quality of a product from its packaging, the quality of a service from the image of the shop from the street, or the quality of an experience from the accent of the person answering a phone, we establish expectations and make quality judgements long before we really know what the company has to offer. As business leaders we can either fight this natural inclination because \u2018that\u2019s not right!\u2019 or we can learn from it and recognize that in modern business, perceptions are often more powerful and important than actual performance.<\/p>\n
Most customers will make the decision on whether to buy your product before they ever see what is in the box.\u00a0 The perception of quality starts before the customer makes a purchase in the form of promotion, packaging, presentation, price and reputation (the P\u2019s of marketing along with a few other things).\u00a0 Its not any individual factor, but the combined perception of all of them together which establishes a baseline expectation on the quality of your company\u2019s product.\u00a0 Customers are also influenced by previous experiences with yours (and other\u2019s) products and the reputation of your company\u2019s brand overall.<\/p>\n
Quality services have more to do with environment than capability<\/strong><\/p>\n Service quality is a bit different from physical products and often stylistic preferences and personal biases play a large role in establishing perception.\u00a0 Most of the quality factors for products also apply to services: promotion, presentation, price, reputation and past experiences.\u00a0 Additionally, customers will often place a large value on the environment in which the service takes place (is it clean, well lit, fresh smelling, etc.) and the expected duration of the service engagement (am I going to experience this for a few min or a few weeks?).\u00a0 Ironically, these factors often have little to do with the skill, experience or competency of the person providing the service and therefore aren\u2019t good indicators of service quality, however they often have a big impact on the purchasing decision that is being made.<\/p>\n While customers make an initial quality assessment when they are making the decision to do business with your business (or not), what is more important is the lasting impression that your company leaves as a result of the holistic experience of doing business with the customer.\u00a0 The one caveat to this is that not all elements of the experience will be remembered equally.\u00a0 Customers are likely to remember extremes, both good and bad \u2013 forgetting the majority of the experience elements that simply \u201cmeet expectations\u201d. From the perspective of a business trying to retain customers, this is an important point \u2013 you should focus your energy on avoiding negative situations and emphasizing a couple of really positive points.\u00a0 For all the \u2018stuff\u2019 in the middle, good-enough is\u2026 good enough.<\/p>\n Along the same lines as managing experience extremes, customers are expecting a consistent level of quality when engaging with your company and take notice quickly when they encounter something inconsistent with their expectations.\u00a0 For example, the quality of a product should be consistent with the brand perception and the quality of the presentation and packaging.\u00a0 Customers who open a high-quality box to find a low-quality product are likely to feel disappointed. Conversely, a high-quality product in a low-quality package is likely to cause confusion.\u00a0 Likewise, service customers don\u2019t expect the best quality technicians to work in a messy shop environment or a high-quality shop environment to provide low-quality service.\u00a0 The lesson here is to avoid creating dissidence between perceived quality and the quality provided so your customers have the right expectations and receive what they expect.<\/p>\n The issue of perceived quality vs. performance is becoming increasingly important in modern business environments where customers have greater access to information and opinions not just from the company but from other customers.\u00a0 As business leaders, we need to learn from our customers behavior and realize that people do judge a book by its cover and use this lesson to make the holistic experience engaging with our company consistent and congruent with how we want to be perceived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the saying goes, \u201cyou can\u2019t judge a book by its cover\u201d \u2026 but that is precisely what we do as consumers every day.\u00a0 Whether it is judging the quality of a product from its packaging, the quality of a service from the image of the shop from the street, or the quality of an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[85],"class_list":["post-25371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQuality experiences lead to repeat business<\/h4>\n
Avoiding dissidence<\/h4>\n