Which Is Better? ‘The Best Money Can Buy’ or ‘Best Value For The Dollar.’

      “There is a huge difference between ‘the best that money can buy’ and ‘the best value for the dollar.’ Knowing which is most important to the customer is crucial.” – Anonymous.  We need to keep this quote in mind as we dig into our process improvement projects.  It becomes even more important as you deal with such process improvement trends as “exceeding customer expectations.”

Is exceeding customer expectations an appropriate approach to take?  My view is before you do you must deeply and carefully consider the long-term implications.  Your enterprise, whatever its’ size, serves various clients, consumers and customers. They all demand and expect the best value for the dollar. That’s fair, and if you can’t meet that standard, you’re not going to be in business for too long.

Be careful though.  If you take the exceeding customer expectations approach literally you are leaving money on the table. Another term is over-engineering the product and that doesn’t always make sense (or cents) to me.  Additionally, you’ve now raised the bar; this new product or service level will be ‘table stakes’ in your customers’ eyes. If you don’t hit that level with every product or service, every transaction, every single day, you have now created a problem you didn’t need to have in the first place.

After careful analysis and reflection, you may decide exceeding the customer’s expectations is the right thing to do.  If so, by all means do it and may sure your organization does it well.  But don’t say you will and fail to deliver.  Over promising and under delivering is another sure path to eventual closure of your enterprise.  A better approach is to use the same words but rearranged differently: under promise and over deliver.

Practical Process Improvement (PPI) PIPs are:

• Views, estimates, predictions, and/or forecasts from over thirty years’ experience in the process improvement trenches
• We will post new PPI PIPs periodically – please check back often
• Three or four paragraphs in length with three to four sentences in each
• They DO NOT represent the views of members of the firms’ current or past employers, clients, or others we associate with.