Meeting – And Exceeding – Customer Expectations
/By Hylan Joseph
What drives a remarkable operation?
I ask this question quite a bit. Ultimately, the answer falls to meeting customer expectations while making sure we’re creating customer value exceeding price perception. In my years in the restaurant and coffee business, I’ve seen some good companies, some great companies, and some truly remarkable companies, but I’ve only seen a handful that can master this.
How do they create customers that are loyal beyond doubt and price? This question applies to the single business owner, café owner, and even the large corporations. What’s the key to being remarkable, providing great service and exceeding customer expectations?
Consider this piece of data from Harvard Business Review: 96% of unhappy customers will never tell the vendor they are unhappy. 82% of those customers will happily tell their other business relationships that they had an unhappy experience. We’re darned if we do, we’re darned if we don’t. First, we need to understand what our customer expects.
The first step is to ask some questions:
What is the nature of the customer’s expectations? Are there different types of expectations? What applies to one customer may not apply to another, how do you create a standard?
How realistic are their expectations? Most importantly, can you meet the expectation without excuse? Will the expectations change over time?
Is there a way to manage these expectations that exceed customer perception? The under-promise, over-deliver rule.
How do you manage how the customer sees the service? Are there ways to better manage this?
To start, service customers will want basic service fundamentals: be competent, explain things, be respectful, and fix my problem. No empty promises, no fanciness. They want us to play fair. Reliability is always the ideal outcome.
We’re in a business where our customer is reliant upon us to keep them in business. We’re reliant on our customers’ end-users because if our customers’ sales drop off, so do ours. The $95 per hour that we’re charging to service the equipment may cost the customer up to $300 per hour when you include lost sales. These customers will always expect service at a competency that matches the price they pay. Price awareness is always present. Most of our customers believe that the more they pay, the better – and more prompt – the service should be.
If we understand the basics, and we’re meeting this expectation, this presents us with the opportunity to improve our service perceptions by designing a service process that is the key to exceeding customer service expectations.
In the next article, we will go over the steps in re-thinking your service process.