National Clothesline

Since it began operations in 2000, JetBlue has become the envy of the airline industry. JetBlue dominated J. D. Power and Associates’ most recent study on airline passenger satisfaction, beating all of the traditional carriers like United and American by incredible margins.

How did this upstart airline make such a huge impact in such a short time?

JetBlue started with a fleet of brand new planes and installed wider leather seats with more legroom and a live DirectTV screen on the back of each seat.

Most importantly, they instituted a culture built on friendliness and quality service. They insisted on strict hiring standards and instilled a passion among its employees to do things the right way.

“We started from day one with the premise that we wanted to bring humanity back to air travel,” CEO David Neeleman said. “We knew if people liked the experience of air travel more, if the whole experience with interacting with our company was better, then we could levitate above a commodity business.”

Simply stated, JetBlue set out from the beginning to create an airline built on advocacy, not just satisfaction.

But satisfaction is worthless unless it translates into increased business. Compared to other airlines, JetBlue has an unprecedented number of advocates who do in fact go out of their way to fly their airline. Just as their CEO predicted, JetBlue advocates will drive to a less convenient airport or fly at a less convenient time to fly this airline instead of a competitor. All of this has led to JetBlue having 16 consecutive profitable quarters.

The reality is: just keeping your customers merely satisfied in today’s competitive environment is like running in place. By meeting but not exceeding the basic levels of customer service and quality, a company is leaving itself vulnerable to attack from just about every angle, including price.

Apathetic customers are willing to stay loyal to your business, but they are unlikely to endure an inconvenience or pay a premium to do it. And they are always open to marketing messages from competitors. Given a better price, they are far more likely to give it a try. And they are definitely not advocates, who will praise your services.

An interesting point about customer satisfaction: there is less change in behavior associated with improving satisfaction in the middle of the satisfaction curve than there is on either end. See the chart.

As you can see, the loyalty line is really more of a curve. The curve is flatter in the middle (home of the apathetics), but becomes steeper on each end where the line either rises into advocacy or drops into the realm of assassins.

This chart illustrates the typical satisfaction vs. loyalty curve. The flattening in the middle reflects the fact that unless a cleaner is truly able to separate itself from the middle of the pack, small increases in customer satisfaction within the simply satisfied range will yield a relatively small impact on behavior.

In the eyes of the customer, best is always better than good — airline travelers would prefer a sandwich over peanuts.

Providing the best, however, just isn’t always economically feasible. Not every cleaner can be the Ritz-Carlton; someone has to be the Holiday Inn, and someone even needs to be the Motel 6. You just need to balance the financial benefits of any action against the cost.

Just because you’re a discount cleaner doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend money to improve customer satisfaction. You may find providing coffee and donuts in the morning is cheap compared to the increase in satisfaction it brings.

The analysis needed to make this decision isn’t that difficult. It just requires looking at things in a different way:

First, determine how what you change will change the way your customers feel about your services (measured in terms of customer satisfaction). In other words, will what you do significantly improve your customers’ satisfaction?

Secondly, determine how this improvement in customer satisfaction will impact how your customers behave (loyalty, word-of-mouth, willingness to pay premium prices, etc.).

This is important, because customer satisfaction is completely meaningless unless it translates into profit-generating behavior on the part of customers. Until you really think through the cost versus benefit of increased customer satisfaction, adding new services, new technology or additional staff may be a waste of time and money.

You may be asking yourself, “Why all the talk about the need to turn apathetics into advocates if the cost to do it outweighs the benefits?”

The answer is that cleaners need to be aware of the possibility that they could be wasting their satisfaction dollars.

The reality is that most businesses underestimate the value of improving customer satisfaction and are more likely to make the mistake of not implementing an improvement. This usually occurs because they fail to see the long-term benefit of increased satisfaction.

Great companies build advocates one at a time. They understand all the different ways they touch their customers so they can maximize their return at each touchpoint.