Customer Satisfaction 3 — The Automaker's Perspective
Failure rate, repair time, or hours the car cannot be driven? Chasing the real customer-satisfaction metric — and how it changes the entire solution.
The Lower the Failure Rate, the Happier the Customer? Some time ago I was talking with a senior manager at a car company about customer satisfaction. He said: the lower the failure rate, the more satisfied the customer. So I asked: what exactly do you mean by a low failure rate? He answered: obviously, the fewer times a car fails, the better. That sounds perfectly reasonable. I kept going: do a major failure and a minor failure carry the same weight? He thought for a moment: of course not. And that question could be debated forever. But push the thinking one level deeper, and something else shows up: the number of failures has surprisingly little to do with the person actually using the car. Fail or don't fail — as long as getting around is not affected, it is fine. The Real Need: Mobility, Not a Low Failure Rate Once that is clear, the conclusion follows: what the customer needs is to get around, not a low failure rate. The ideal would be zero failures, so that mobility is never affected — but that is not achievable. So push one step deeper: is repair time a good metric? The shorter...
