“We convened this board meeting to look into ways we can make more money,” Bryce said to the assembled audience of board members. “We want to make some cuts, and now we have to decide what to do to get there. I’d like to give the floor to Miles to offer us an idea.”
Miles stood up and opened a PowerPoint presentation on a projector over the boardroom table. The first slide displayed a graph comparing Bryceco, the company in question, to its competitors in terms of customer satisfaction. Byrceco sported a 92% customer satisfaction rate, while the four closest competitors all had customer satisfaction rates in the 40s.
“As you can see, we’re dominating the customer satisfaction demographic,” Miles said, switching to a slide showing dozens of happy, smiling customers. “We are loved for our friendly service, premium features, value for money spent and quality of product. We’ve done great work, but if we want to save money, we should make cuts here.”
The following slide showed a graph of future projections, indicating that customer satisfaction would slowly decline by five percent per year over the next five years.
“You want to make our customers unhappy?” Bryce asked.
“Just a little unhappy. We have such an advantage, what are the customers going to do?”
“Leave us?” Bryce offered.
“No, we make it a slow decline,” Miles said. “We start by cutting costs for our customer service agents, then we remove some free features and make them premium. Then we compromise on the quality of our products. This would all be done to save money.”
“But we’re the best!” Bryce said. The board members all nodded.
“And now we’ll be a little bit better than the rest,” Miles said. He turned to the last slide, which showed a Bryceco logo, and written underneath the logo it said: ‘A Little Bit Better than the Rest!’