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Unit 3: Customer Accommodation

Firms typically assess their customer service performance relative to how well these internal Notes
standards are accomplished. The customer satisfaction platform is built on the recognition that
customers have expectations regarding performance and the only way to ensure that customers
are satisfied is to assess their perceptions of performance relative to those expectations.
Customer success shifts the focus from expectations to the customers’ real requirements.
Customer requirements, while forming the basis for expectations, are not the same as expectations.
Requirements are frequently downgraded into expectations due to perceptions of previous
performance, word-of-mouth, or communications from the firm itself. This explains why simply
meeting expectations may not result in happy customers.

Example: A customer may be satisfied with a 98 percent fill rate, but for the customer to
be successful in executing its own strategy, a 100 percent fill rate on certain products or components
may be necessary.

3.4.1 Achieving Customer Success

Clearly, a customer success program involves a thorough understanding of individual customer
requirements and a commitment to focus on long-term business relationships having high
potential for growth and profitability. Such commitment most likely cannot be made to all
potential customers. It requires that firms work intensively with customers to understand
requirements, internal processes, competitive environment, and whatever else it takes for the
customer to be successful in its own competitive arena. Further, it requires that an organization
develop an understanding of how it can utilize its own capabilities to enhance customer
performance.



Caselet Dow Plastics, a Division of Dow Chemical

n 1988, Dow hired the Anderson & Lembke ad agency, which is known for its cutting-
edge creativity. Dow had just realigned its various plastics businesses into a single
Iunit called Dow Plastics. Anderson & Lembke’s tasks were to publicize the new entity
and assist in its competitive positioning. Dow’s customers and its competitors’ customers
were surveyed. They ranked Dow a distant third behind industry leaders DuPont and GE
Plastics. However, customers were unhappy with the service level they received from all
three. “Vendors peddled resins as a commodity,” says Hans Ullmark, president of Anderson
& Lembke. “They competed on price and delivered on time, but gave no service.” These
findings, confirmed by about 200 qualitative interviews, led to a positioning strategy that
exceeded the standard customer service guarantee to promise customer success.
This strategy, which began as a tag line for a division, grew in influence until it became the
core of the parent company’s mission statement: “We don’t succeed unless you do.” It was
concluded that whether a customer was using Dow plastics to manufacture grocery bags
or complex aerospace applications, Dow Plastics needed to help them succeed in their
markets. A campaign was developed which included print ads, direct-mail pieces, and
supportive materials. The targeted communications promoted the different virtues of
Dow Plastics’ disparate products, but all carried the tag line “We don’t succeed unless you
do.” This slogan and underlying philosophy tied the units together and created a brand
identity for the division. These campaigns were instrumental in changing Dow Plastics
from a sales-oriented company into a market-oriented company-from selling plastics to
selling customer success. Dow has become the most preferred plastics supplier. Dow’s
philosophy is so transformed that when a new product or market is encountered, they ask,
“How does this fit in with ‘We don’t succeed unless you do’?”
Source: Naney Amott, “Getting the Picture,” Sales and Marketing Management, June 1994, p. 74

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