Why Satisfaction is always so elusive

Would you rather be a king 500 years ago or a middle class person today?

Your answer is revelatory on how you view human satisfaction. If you think satisfaction is an objective condition you might prefer being a middle class person with an iphone, abundant food, water and modern medicine.

If on the other hand, you view human satisfaction as always relative to your expectations you pick the king from 500 years ago. Afterall the king in those days had no expectations of living in a peaceful, abundant world and couldn’t even fathom the Telephone.

We are by many measures more miserable than our ancestors. How can that be? After-all we are objectively better off than they were.

Our DNA is programmed to raise our expectations as our conditions improve.

“We become happy when reality matches our expectations.” — Yuval Harrari

The formula for happy humans is: Objective reality ≥ Current expectations.

All of us are in the business of making other people but my professional life has been spent in customer experience so I live this phenomena daily.

The head of a governmental agency was on local news bragging about how they had reduced wait times, and customer satisfaction was at an all time high. They had reduced the average wait time from 3 hours to 1 hour. His citizens were thrilled, because that reality whatever you may think of it, is better than the expectations.

Conversely I once delivered a scathing customer assessment to a room full of C-Suite executives at a high end Hospitality brand. Their head of Guest Services was fuming the entire time I presented and then said “They are probably writing these sh*tty reviews from the golden toilets in their suites.” I asked him to turn to a specific page in the report and read him a quote that read “I was promised opulence fit for royalty and was underwhelmed”.

His beef was really with his own CMO.

Your biggest obstacle to Satisfying your constituents might not be just external, it may actually be your own marketing department, and advertising writ large.

While you work hard on improving things, a force with better resources is raising expectations a lot faster than you can keep up. Expectations are being raised by your competitors, and even other industries.

For his 16th birthday my son asked me for a car, he picked an older Dodge, I bought him a one year old Nissan to his surprise. He was the happiest kid on earth, until of course he found out his best friend got a brand new car with all the bells and whistles. Keeping people happy is a tough job.

Connect with me on linkedin

Order your copy of my latest book: Waiting for Service