Why is it that some products or services have characteristics that excite customers while so many fail to even meet the most basic of customer expectations. How can we reliably achieve, in a customer-driven fashion, the features of a product or service that will position a company ahead of its competition.

There may be considered three different levels of customer satisfaction:

• Basic quality. Represents requirements customers will usually not talk about or request - they assume these requirements will be there. They are unspoken unless violated, but the customer will never be delighted.
   
• Performance quality. Represents spoken or verbalised wants from customers and is typical of most market research activities. The customer is dissatisfied when the organisation does not deliver these attributes, or is satisfied when these attributes are achieved.
   
• Excitement quality. This is unspoken and unexpected by customers. If absent the customer is not dissatisfied. If present and well implemented excitement quality can deliver enormous levels of customer satisfaction.

Satisfying and delighting customers requires more than just listening and responding to current needs and discovering performance quality. You must also deliver the expected basic quality requirements and anticipate the excitement opportunities that can position the organisation ahead of the competition.

Organisations must pursue a never-ending, steady state process to gather, analyse and interpret excitement opportunities and gradually develop and implement them into their products and services.

Opportunities can be found from:

• Observing the customer
  Understanding customer frustrations, confusion etc can lead to a higher probability that brainstorming new features and solutions will truly respond to real customer issues.
   
• Dramatic improvements in performance
  Make a dramatic improvement in an important spoken customer requirement such that now the product or service exceeds the competition. Establishing the organisation as a leader is often associated with being an innovator.
   
• Eliminate or improve a key product trade-off
  Remove engineering compromises that arise from limitations in current technology. Provide a paradigm shift resulting from proprietary technologies and patents.
   
• Improve where everyone else is doing poorly
  Conduct competitive intelligence to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Where all your competitors perform poorly in some attribute consider this as an opportunity to delight the customer.
   
• Lateral benchmarking
  Brainstorm other (different to yours) product and services to find out what may be adapted to your own product. These concepts will be perceived as innovative by customers as they represent ideas that haven't been used by your competitors. What's more this strategy is low risk as the technology has already been proven.

A focus on ensuring the basic requirements of your product or service is maintained, there is continued improvement in the performance of spoken requirements and with the prudent use of excitement quality you can delight your customers and make a profit.