3D Businesses delight their customers! They do it by exceeding customer expectations. It’s an ingredient of 3D Characteristic #3 Create Delighted and Devoted Customers.
Lowering your customer expectations to such levels to make it easy to do that is the strategy of the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam.
Its Dramatic Difference is that unlike so many hotels who try and raise the bar, they lower it as far as it will go and it seems to be working!
This is what they say on their website:
“The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel has been proudly disappointing travellers for forty years. Boasting levels of comfort comparable to a minimum-security prison, the Hans Brinker also offers some plumbing and an intermittently open canteen serving a wide range of dishes based on runny eggs.”
They also ‘boast’ that other amenities include:
– A basement bar with limited light and no fresh air.
– A concrete courtyard where you can relax and enjoy whatever sunshine is able to pass the high buildings on either side on the extremely infrequent days when it’s actually sunny.
– An elevator that almost never breaks down between floors.
– A bar serving slightly watered down beer.
– Amusing witticisms and speculations about former guests’ sexual preferences scrawled on most surfaces.
– The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, Amsterdam Luxury Ambassadorial Suite (featuring the Hans Brinker’s one and only bath-tub).
– Doors that lock.
Daft as it sounds – it seems to work! By lowering customer expectations and doing it in a ‘tongue in cheek’ way they consistently meet, and clearly in some cases, exceed their customers expectations. It’s obviously not for everyone – they target a specific group of customers, which again, is a charactersitic of 3D businesses – they ‘Choose ‘Em Or Lose ‘Em’!
It’s a Dramatically Different approach that makes it number #18 in our 3D Challenge search for 100 ideas!
The lessons for you and your business? I’m not saying that you should lower your customers’ expectations, but maybe it’s a nice prompt to make sure that you…
a) understand them
b) manage them and crucially….
c) try to exceed them – that’s customer delight!
For more ideas on customer delight (not necessarily like the Hans Brinker Hotel!), you can download this FREE 44 page ebook ‘Customer Delight As Competitive Advantage! 60 Ideas To Help Make It Work For You’
