We often talk about giving customers what they want. But there is a problem with that apparently simple idea: not everything a customer wants has the same effect on customer satisfaction.
Some things simply have to be there. Some things are better the more of them we provide. Some things customers barely notice. And occasionally we can do something completely unexpected that delights them.
This is the thinking behind the Kano Model.
Developed in the 1980s by Japanese professor Noriaki Kano, the model provides a useful way of thinking about the relationship between the things we provide and the satisfaction of the people receiving them.
For those of us working with Lean, that’s particularly interesting. Lean asks us to understand value from the customer’s perspective. Kano helps us dig a little deeper and ask:
What sort of value is it?
The diagram below illustrates the five categories in the Kano Model and, importantly, shows how providing more of something doesn’t necessarily result in greater customer satisfaction.
Must-be quality: “Of course it should do that”
Imagine checking into a hotel and discovering that your room is clean, the bed has been made and there is hot water in the shower.
Delighted? Probably not. You expected all of those things.
Now imagine arriving to find dirty bedding or no hot water. Suddenly you have a very dissatisfied customer.
These are must-be qualities. Their presence doesn’t necessarily make customers happier, but their absence certainly makes them unhappy.
Universities are full of examples. A student expects their enrolment to be recorded correctly, their timetable to be accurate and their examination results to belong to them rather than somebody else.
Getting these things right isn’t exceptional service. It is simply what the customer reasonably expects.
That’s an important lesson for improvement work. There isn’t much point investing enormous effort in creating exciting new services if we’re still getting the basics wrong.
One-dimensional quality: more is better
The second category is one-dimensional quality, sometimes called performance quality.
Here there is a much more direct relationship between performance and satisfaction.
Waiting time is a good example. If an organisation tells customers that enquiries will be answered within five working days, taking ten days is likely to cause dissatisfaction. Answering within two days is likely to produce greater satisfaction.
The same applies to things such as speed, accuracy, reliability and ease of access. These are also the attributes organisations tend to compete on:
“We answer 90% of calls within 30 seconds.”
The cynic in me asks: why not all of them?
“Applications processed within five working days.”¹
The cynic again: isn’t this just an arbitrary target?
“Same-day delivery.”
The cynic again: really? Will that happen?
The better the performance, generally speaking, the happier the customer. And because customers can see the difference, these are often fruitful areas for Lean improvement.
Attractive quality: “Oh! I wasn’t expecting that”
Then we come to the interesting category: attractive quality, sometimes described as a delighter — something the customer wasn’t expecting in the first place.
Imagine this. Your new purchase has a fault. You expect the shop to replace it or give you a refund. I do.
Instead, you get an immediate refund, an apology and a credit towards your next purchase.
You weren’t expecting the extra gesture, so it creates a disproportionately positive response — a warm glow. The important point is that its absence wouldn’t have caused dissatisfaction. You didn’t know you were going to receive it.
The same thing can happen in a university.
A prospective student contacts an office expecting an answer to a question. They receive the answer, but the member of staff also anticipates the next two questions they’re likely to have and provides that information as well.
A small amount of additional effort may save the student two further contacts and leave them thinking:
That was really helpful.
That’s attractive quality.
Indifferent quality: does anybody actually care?
This category should be particularly interesting to anyone involved in Lean.
Indifferent qualities are things that make little or no difference to the customer. Organisations can spend considerable amounts of time, money and effort providing things that customers simply don’t value.
Sometimes they’re necessary behind the scenes. A particular component inside a computer may be essential to making it work, but the customer neither knows nor cares which particular component has been used.
I don’t.
The service equivalent can be even more revealing.
Perhaps we’ve spent months redesigning an internal form, producing elaborate reports or adding another layer to an approval process.
Does the customer value any of it?
Do they even know it happens?
That doesn’t automatically mean the activity is unnecessary. Some activities are required for legal, regulatory, financial or operational reasons.
But it should make us ask a very Lean question:
Why are we doing this?
And, if it doesn’t create value for the customer and isn’t otherwise necessary:
Why are we still doing it?
Reverse quality: when “better” makes things worse
Finally, Kano identified reverse quality. This is where adding something that we believe improves a product or service actually reduces satisfaction for some customers.
Technology provides lots of examples.
A company adds more features to an application because it believes more functionality must make the product better. Yet some customers — I’m one — preferred the simple version. The additional menus, options and notifications simply make it harder to use.
We’ve probably all encountered websites where somebody has enthusiastically added pop-ups, chat windows, recommendations, surveys and notifications.
Every addition may have been intended as an improvement.
Collectively, they can make you want to leave the website.
More isn’t always better.
There’s another catch: customer expectations move
Perhaps the most useful aspect of the Kano Model is that these categories aren’t necessarily permanent.
Today’s delighter can become tomorrow’s expectation.
There was a time when free Wi-Fi in a hotel was an attractive extra. Today, many customers simply expect it. I do, and it’d better be good. What was once an attractive quality has migrated towards a must-be quality.
The same happens with services.
Fast online responses, electronic documents, online booking and immediate confirmation may once have impressed customers. As they become commonplace elsewhere, customers — I do — begin to expect them everywhere.
That means organisations need to keep listening.
What delighted customers five years ago may barely register today.
What does Kano have to do with Lean?
Quite a lot.
Lean tells us that value is defined from the perspective of the customer. But simply asking customers, “What do you want?” doesn’t necessarily tell us the whole story.
The Kano Model encourages us to ask better questions.
Which aspects of our service must work every time?
Which aspects create more satisfaction as performance improves?
Where might we provide a small, unexpected improvement that genuinely delights people?
And perhaps most importantly:
What are we spending time and money doing that our customers simply don’t care about?
That last question can be uncomfortable. It can also be extremely useful.
Because improvement isn’t about doing everything faster. It isn’t about adding more features. And it certainly isn’t about giving customers more of everything.
Lean is about understanding what creates value and then organising our processes to deliver that value as effectively as possible.
The Kano Model gives us another way of seeing what that value actually means.
And sometimes the biggest improvement isn’t adding something new.
It’s making absolutely sure that the things customers simply expect us to get right actually are right.
If you would like to find out how we can help your organisation understand customer value and improve the processes that deliver it, please contact us.
¹ I once worked in a government organisation that shall remain nameless where we reduced a two-year turnaround time to just five business days. And no, we didn’t use Lean to achieve that dramatic improvement. Lean was unknown to us at the time. We used what could probably best be described as a ‘slash and burn’ approach. The human cost was significant, with many staff becoming surplus to requirements, and relationships with clients initially suffered. On the positive side, productivity increased dramatically, quality improved and there was a much greater sense of pride in the organisation. Would I recommend doing it that way today? Absolutely not. I cringe at the memory. But, it remains a striking example of just how much unnecessary time and activity can become embedded in a process.