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Fix perception before fixing reality
The perception gap
Ask people what share of first-class mail arrives the next day, and the typical answer would be 50 to 60 percent. When perception sits that far below reality, pushing the reality higher is effort spent in the wrong place.
Telling people the number
The better move is to tell people the number. Getting 98 percent of first-class mail there the next day is pretty good.
Choosing the comparison
The comparison matters too. In Britain, a stronger frame of reference is that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the UK than in Germany, because the quickest way to make Britons happy about something is to tell them they do it better than the Germans. Pick the frame of reference, and the perceived value of the same service changes with it.
Why do people underestimate services that work?
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the availability heuristic in a 1973 paper: people judge how common something is by how easily examples come to mind. A late letter produces a story, a complaint, and a memory, while a letter that arrives on time produces nothing. Failures therefore take up far more mental space than their share of the total. The paper appeared in the journal Cognitive Psychology.
How does a comparison change satisfaction?
Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory holds that people judge outcomes against a reference point rather than in absolute terms. The same result registers as a gain or a loss depending on the point it is measured against. Moving the reference point from perfection to another country's service shifts the verdict on identical performance. The theory was published in 1979 in the journal Econometrica.
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