As usual, we started our day with a workout, and then had breakfast. Breakfast is always my favorite meal at these all-inclusive resorts. My favorite breakfast items are:
- Yogurt bar with dozens of toppings
- Omlettes
- Oatmeal with chocolate and other topings
- Nutella and berry crepes
- Tons and tons of fresh fruit.
After breakfast, Lily and I went back to our room and had a massage. IT WAS AMAZING! One of my favorite parts of the massage was that they positioned us over the window in the floor of our room so that we could stare at the ocean while we were getting our massage. It was wonderful.
We spent the rest of the day relaxing and reading on the beach and I snorkeled in the resort’s lagoon pond and saw fun fish.
On the beach, I finished the book, Wallet Allocation Rule. One of the authors was Luke Williams who works at Qualtrics.
The basic premise of the book is that companies often believe that the way they will get more market-share is to increase their customer satisfaction. Yet there really is no relationship between customer satisfaction and market share, or if there is, there is a negative one, because as a company gets bigger, it must serve a more diverse customer base and therefore it cannot be as tailored to each individual customer, and also companies with the most market-share are often busier, making for a poorer customer experience. The book points out that many of the biggest companies, McDonalds, Walmart etc, don’t have the highest customer satisfaction, whereas smaller companies often have much higher satisfaction (for example, K-Mart had amazing satisfaction right before going into bankruptcy). This is also because satisfaction only asks customers to rate the experiences the company offers them (a small company has fewer experiences to focus on nailing), but it does not ask customers to consider what they would like that company to offer that it doesn’t yet currently offer.
This is where the Wallet Allocation Rule comes in. The Wallet Allocation Rule says that focusing on Satisfaction in a vacuum is almost meaningless. Instead, companies should focus on their relative satisfaction compared to the other companies that their customers are spending money with. The book points out that companies obsess over retention, but that is the wrong metric to focus on. It’s not so much if your customer will continue to shop at your store as it is, what can your store do to get the customer to start spending more at your store and less at other stores. To find that out, you need to survey customers, ask them what competitors they use, ask them to rank you against the competing companies, and then ask them what drives their decisions to shop elsewhere. Then, you can start to understand what things you con implement to make it so your customers don’t choose to go elsewhere as much, and this will increase your share of wallet with your customers, and thus your marketshare. This, the book states, and I agree, is a much more effective way to gain market-share than just by focusing on increasing your customer satisfaction in a vacuum
When we did Facetime with our children today, they lamented the fact that we were not with them on Valentine’s day because we’ve made it fun for them in the past. We miss our children, and are very excited to see them!
We had dinner at the health food restaurant again. Our favorite waiter, Elia, gave us a bottle of honey from his grandfather. We also learned that Elia was losing his job, and he felt it was because he dressed like a woman and was gay, and management was not accepting of him. We felt the Elia did a wonderful job serving and we were sad for him, however, we were happy to learn he found a housekeeping job at another resort that he thought would be more accepting. I hope WE ALL can be more accepting of beautiful people like Elia. He was one of the bright spots of our trip, and it was so thoughtful of him to bring us a jar of honey.