Living Up to Expectations
There is nothing worse in this world than being let down. This is true in so many arenas, but in your business and the customers with which you only get so many chances, it’s incredibly important. So why is it that your salespeople continue to make the same mistake over and over again? This mistake of setting high expectations and continuing to not meet them for any number of reasons and excuses. A completely avoidable mistake and one that can make a world of difference in your company’s customer experience.
Today's tidbit might be a bit shorter, but it is oh so important. The key to five-star reviews and happy customers is setting realistic expectations and then meeting them. What a unique concept - meeting someone's expectations! Trivial though it may seem, not living up to the experience or product your sales team has sold is detrimental to your repeat customer base. It is like buying a Ferrari but having a Fiero delivered. If you don’t know what a Fiero is, google it. Yikes!
What creates this lack of follow-through in regards to customers’ expectations? The most common cause is often the fact that salespeople sell the best-case scenario. They want to paint a great picture for their clients and who wouldn’t want that? The best-case scenario is also what should be aimed for in each customer experience. So where does this cycle of setting expectations and fulfilling expectations go wrong? Where does the customer’s experience get trounced?
It goes wrong when that salesperson passes off this perfectly sold customer to the operations team or product deliverers and then simply goes on to the next sales opportunity.
From the other side: the team delivering the product or service doesn’t set out to disappoint their customers. This is obviously true of any business worth their salt. However, because the execution team often operates from a top-down perspective - gauging stress on employees, timelines, available materials, ramifications of multiple jobs, and so on - the concern for the individual customers’ experience can sometimes slip by the wayside. This can happen from time to time without any large ramifications, but when does it become a problem? This failure to fulfill customer expectations becomes a problem when it loses you return customers and tarnishes your company reputation as a whole.
So how do we fix it?
1. The first step is to meet with your team. Study all of the transactions that went according to plan with your customers. Try to figure out what made them successful and learn how to replicate that success.
2. Create a hand off system between your salespeople and your operations team. The operations team needs to know what the salesperson sold and what expectations the salesperson learned. In return, the salesperson needs to know the ins and outs of how the service is going to be provided or how the product is going to be delivered from the operations team. Over time, this conversation and nurtured dialogue will help to deliver quality results. When the people who set the expectations coordinate with the people who are fulfilling the expectations, the customer’s experience is all smooth sailing. Not to mention, the animosity that often exists between these two crucial groups is greatly reduced. Happy customers and a happy team. What more could a business owner want?!
3. When things do go side-ways on the day of the service or during the product delivery, don't keep problems from the customers and don’t rush a project because you get backed up. It never ends well. In this post-COVID world, customers are a lot more forgiving. If materials didn’t show up, employees got sick, and any number of other one off situations came up, take the time to explain to the customer what happened. Explain what is going on and be honest. By doing that, you are then able to reset the customer expectations in regards to when the issue should be resolved.
Communication solves most problems - communication between the customer and sales, sales and ops, and ops and the customer. It only gets better when you learn to create open honest communication from the first phone call to the last. People want to know when they can expect things and if you fail to meet the customer’s expectation it creates animosity from the customer towards you. Go read all the 1 star reviews for any company on Google or Facebook and you will more than likely find a failure to communicate on some level.
Work with your team to start creating proper customer communication by setting realistic and achievable expectations and watch your customers fall in love with you all over again!
Enjoy,
Brandon