4 Customer Expectations Fundamentals Your Business Must Meet
Customers’ needs vary by industry, sectors and tiered criteria. For example, customers demand a different kind of relationship from their plumber than they do from their physician or doctors. They expect a more specialized and intimate bond with their financial advisor or a B2B enterprise relationship than they do with their local grocery store.
Albeit, in a successive research conducted by Gallup via interview over the last twenty years and covering up to a billion customers in an attempt to identify what customers really desire or want. Four customer expectations remain consistent across various types of businesses and people and serve as building blocks on which other things emerge.
The four customer expectations are hierarchical → meaning the lower level of expectations must be met before customers are ready to pay attention to the higher levels.
- LEVEL 1: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT ACCURACY
- LEVEL 2: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT AVAILABILITY
- LEVEL 3: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT PARTNERSHIP
- LEVEL 4: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT ADVICE
These four customer expectations building blocks are what businesses and organizations must do to fully satisfy their customers and further turn them into advocates for more influx which effects overall customer experience that could translate into growth (revenue increase) and a long-run existence of such business entity.
LEVEL 1: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT ACCURACY
This is the lowest level of customers’ expectation – accuracy. This is all about delivering on what was promised by your business entity.
For example, B2B customers expect material suppliers to deliver what they have requested accordingly to contractual agreement; customers expect their bank statements to accurately reflect their balance; they expect the fulfilment of their ordered goods or service delivered as portrayed; they expect to be served what they ordered when eating at their favorite restaurant, they expect the hotel to give them the room they had earlier reserved; etc.
Accuracy expectation is the fundamental base of customer expectation. This expectation level is demanded & mandatory intrinsically by customers and not a premium.
As such, no matter how friendly or excellent your company’s customer-facing roles might have, if your company or business entity consistently fails the accuracy test over time, customers withdraw and perceived value declines.
LEVEL 2: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT AVAILABILITY
Availability is the second level of customers’ expectation upwards after accuracy expectation has been met. This is simply leveraging on the convenience factor.
Evidently, businesses that make themselves more accessible will increase the number of customer relationships (transactions for services/products) and further willingness of customers and prospects to employ such company’s services or products.
For example, B2B customers expect service providers/suppliers to attend to their request on time – pick up their phones when they call, attend to their inquiries and etc.; customers expect their preferred restaurants to be open when they want to eat in proximate locations, they expect their banks to be nearby, hence the proliferation of drive-through windows, ATM machines, eMoney and 24/7 online help services and websites.
These first 2 lower levels of customer expectations (Accuracy and Availability) are quite easy to meet as they both lend themselves to step-wise solutions and technological innovations.
However, a competitive advantage cannot be built on these two lower-level expectations as it is quite easy to copy or replicated by competitors and potential entrants. Even if it becomes a competitive advantage for the company due to its uniqueness, it quickly winds down from a competitive advantage to a commodity on the long-run.
LEVEL 3: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT PARTNERSHIP
This is the advanced third level of customers’ expectation – partnership. This involves a demonstrated understanding of your customers with corresponding responsiveness on definitive forms from you.
In basic terms, partnership level of Customer expectation requires:
- Needs identification
- Seeing the world through your customers’ “eyes”
- Prioritization of necessary insights
- Responsiveness and acting upon insights, feedback, etc
Simply, a customer who feels understood with a sense of partnership is an inch closer to being satisfied and soon becoming your business advocate.
LEVEL 4: YOUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT ADVICE
This is the most advanced level of customer expectation – advice (recommendation, guidance, intelligence info, etc.)
Your customers become bonded to you when you have helped them learn and think to achieve their objectives and goals. This could be in different forms:
- It could be in helping mitigate risks,
- provide advisory services that are useful for another adjacent activity of the customer,
- guidance to help save chunk sum of cost,
- provide valuable intelligence that benefits the customer,
- Other forms of advice that add to your customer’s knowledge repository and could be used in furthering business relationships are golden and valued.
As witnessed currently, most businesses and organizations have come to the realization that the degree of advice in terms of learning, valuable recommendations and related things to your customer helps breed loyalty. No wonder most straight shooting businesses/organizations are now employing a consultative approach to the customer business relationships.
These two advanced-level customer expectations (Partnership & Advice) create positive feelings of satisfaction and transform fickle customer into a vocal advocate of your company or business.
MEETING THE 4 CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS BUILDING BLOCKS
Meeting these building blocks of customer expectations (Accuracy, Availability, and especially the advanced ones –Partnership & Advice), requires:
- a deliberate assessment of where you are in terms of your customer expectations levels meeting/fulfillment,
- A goal, strategy and actionable plan to moving upwards to meeting the advanced customer expectations
- Involve your top-notch professionals on the front line who are excellence-wired and could attune to the set goals
- Wire and translate your plans into results and make a meaningful difference by engaging your people and team
Fulfillment of these 4 building blocks of customer expectations will affect your customer loyalty, customer advocacy for your prospects influx, customer satisfaction and overall customer experience that could translate into an increase in revenue (growth) & lower cost to servicing such customer in the long run.
STRATEGYbits provides business development and strategy services to help advance your business growth goals. Let’s discuss how on how we can help you. Reach out to our team [email protected]
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