Business - Written Friday, February 27, 2009 by Naumi Haque - 6 Comments

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Customer Service

I’d like to share a graphic that I’ve been using a lot lately in my presentations about Wikinomics approaches to contact centers.  The original source, I’ve learned, is from the book “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow,” by Chip Conley.  However, I originally came across it while looking at some presentations on SlideShare that were posted by the founders of the third-party customer relations portal Get Satisfaction.

I really like this graphic because it highlights why customer interaction strategies are changing from a transactional approach to one where we focus on the broader customer experience.  I think it’s particularly relevant when we think about what is needed to satisfy each level of the pyramid. 

• Level 1: Companies can meet expectations with current customer service model.  Simply optimizing transactions, having the answers to customer queries, and providing a decent level of service is where the bar is set right now.  Amazingly, many organizations are still struggling to meet these simple customer needs.
• Level 2: To fulfill desires, companies have to figure out exactly what those desires are.  Usually they are articulated, but buried in call data and interactions with company employees.  Analytic tools and predictive modeling software now exist to help companies make sense of customer data, measure emotional responses, quantify customer wants, and respond accordingly.  It can be complex, but it’s not rocket science.  You’re front line employees probably have a good idea of what the customer is asking for; just ask them.
• Level 3: To meet unrecognized needs you have to learn more about the customer and develop a certain intuition about what would make them happy.  The only way to do this is to interact with them – build on what you learned from Level 2, engage them in conversations, and take the time to get to know them at an individual level.  Unrecognized needs are often not articulated, so you have to read between the lines to figure out what is missing from the customer experience.

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