I was dating someone and i was doing all kinds of stuff for her that i thought was sweet, but didn’t really seem to affect her. One day, for some reason, I told her how hard it was to get her flowers because i went to 4 different stores to get the right ones ( there was no event, i just wanted to get her flowers that day). When she saw the flowers, she said thank you, but when I told her the story of what i did to get them, she was over-joyed.
She didn’t really care about flowers. The work i was putting in to getting her flowers and doing these other things were not were not apparent to her, and the resulting stuff (flowers, finding her favorite cereal, etc.) was not super important to her. I could do less and still bring her the same joy or maybe even more joy if i did it in a different way.
I want you to think of value engineering. This is when someone’s making a 100,000 toy cars and they ask…
- can we save 1¢ per car if we don’t paint words on the tires?
- would this change nothing for the customer level of satisfaction?
The second question is crucial. Sometimes we could even sacrifice a tiny bit of satisfaction for the sake of saving ourselves from a lot of time, money, or headaches.
If we’re already over-delivering massively (which is usually the case with the people reading this), maybe we can cut back a little and focus on the stuff that’s most crucial to our people. If I’m running a 5 person show, at 110% audience satisfaction, could I do a 4 person show and still get 100% satisfaction?