#21 Simplicity, British Airways, relationship research, NPS Podcast

I am sure most of us  have said something like “We have to keep things as simple as possible for our customers.” But… what do we mean by that? Different companies take different approaches. I believe simplicity means one of two things in this context. Unfortunately, the two are opposites. In one version of simplicity, you simply say yes to whatever the customer wants. It may take some time to actually deliver what the customer wants. In the other version, you provide a limited number of choices, and can deliver each choice right away.

I don’t think either approach is right or wrong. They are just different. There are businesses, like fast food, where choices have to be limited, or it won’t be fast. There are others, like automobiles, where both approaches work. We see some car brands that offer very few choices, other than the color of the car. This allows dealers to keep the most popular choices in stock. Customers can drive away with their new car shortly after arriving at the dealer. Some brands have twenty different choices of wheel design, five sorts of leather for your seats, each available in four colors, and therefore provide almost infinite permutations and combinations. Whatever you want, the answer is yes, but you may have to wait.

Whatever business you are in, I believe you need to decide which version of simplicity is right for your business and market. Then stick to it.

British Airways update

I have blogged about British Airways’ survey process, and have written about them in one of our books. On top of their tendency to have over 100 screens in their surveys (yes, I have counted them), the main criticism I had was that they never ever wrote back to say what they had improved based on their research. That has now changed. After the most recent Executive Club survey, they wrote to the Bronze members saying that based on their feedback, they would bring back the ability for Bronze members to pick seats at no charge. My retirement last year and my general dislike of transiting through Heathrow mean I have gone from Gold to Silver to Bronze with them over the last three years. I don’t know whether Silver and Gold customers got any feedback. Please let me know. I am quite prepared to change my mind about BA, though not about the horrible transit experience in Heathrow T5, compared to the main continental European airports.

Our latest blog posts

The first two posts of three planned articles on deep customer relationship research are shown below. My Tropicana post surprised me in that it attracted both positive and negative attention. At least nobody has contradicted what I stated about the control distributors and supermarket chains have over farm prices. Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.