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Customer Experience

Managing Expectations

11 min read Translated from the Arabic original

Introduction

Customer experience is defined as: “The impressions and feelings produced by a comparison that the customer makes, consciously and subconsciously, between their expectations and the reality of their experience.” From the definition, we can sense the weight that customer expectations carry in shaping the customer’s perception of any experience they live through. Now if we look at the definition of customer experience management, “the process of understanding the expectations and needs of customers and then either fulfilling them or recalibrating them, to deliver an excellent experience consistently across all touchpoints and through all channels,” our goal as practitioners becomes to be aware of the full picture of our customers’ expectations as a first step, and then to either try to meet them or try to recalibrate them (by managing the expectations). All of this serves a larger purpose: closing the gap between customer expectations and the impressions they draw from the reality of their experience.

Someone will ask, “Why bother?” My answer is that no sensible company wants to keep digging in the wrong place, wasting its resources on things that don’t pay off, watching its market share shrink to competitors day after day, and ultimately finding itself forced to close its doors, as happened to more than 88% of the Fortune 500 companies between 1955 and 2017, despite those being the 500 highest-revenue companies in the United States. Multiple sources confirm that many of these giants won’t survive, for a range of reasons, with customer experience being among the most important. See also CX Maturity Model.

The “Meet the Expectations” School

To return to where we started, the first school is the “meet the expectations” school. Unfortunately, while this may look rosy and bright in theory, in practice it isn’t sustainable, because customer expectations are constantly shifting and rising. Today’s customers compare your services and products not just with your competitors but with every other service and product provider out there. Meeting expectations won’t just spoil the customer, it will bankrupt the company. That said, surprising customers (exceeding their expectations) from time to time is no bad thing; surprise plays a positive and significant role in the nature and longevity of the relationship with the customer. But I may save the element of surprise for a separate, more detailed article.

The “Calibrate Expectations” School

The second school, the school of calibrating expectations, is the one I lean toward, because it’s more objective and more practical. It’s about delivering what can be delivered and what has to be delivered, and recalibrating the expectations that cannot, and shouldn’t, be delivered. To calibrate our customers’ expectations, we need to know how they form, why they differ from one customer to another, and what shapes and influences them. Some of these factors can be controlled by the service/product provider (such as pricing, advertising, brand promise), while others can’t (such as competitors’ offers and word of mouth, or WOM).

Why Do Expectations Differ From One Customer to Another?

Customer experience, when it comes to judging it, is subjective and not objective. It varies from one customer to another, because every customer has their own perspective, their own context, and their own set of expectations. To manage this properly, we first need to understand the source and the reasons behind these differences.

Cultural background: when we think of a Swedish citizen who has recently moved to a developing country, the shock they’ll experience will be far greater than that of a local citizen who is used to the country’s service standards.

Knowledge level: this varies from one customer to another in terms of how they engage with the product or service, particularly with tech-driven services. Customers who work in customer service or customer experience are far more sensitive than other customers because they know, far better than others, what’s right and what’s wrong.

Economic situation: customer expectations can fall or rise depending on the country’s economic situation. Naturally, expectations fall as the economy weakens, and vice versa. The minimum expectation of citizens in some countries is that the state will provide them with a lavish house, while the highest expectation of citizens in another country is to receive a pension that barely keeps them going.

Abundance and scarcity of the service/product: in the era of the industrial revolution, the scarcity of services and products made consumers accept whatever they got (and thank God for it). But with abundance and the multiplication of options, expectations have risen, and the service/product provider is now the one calling out to their customers: “Your wish is my command.” The same applies to the bachelor who, when young, lists endless conditions and an impossible spec sheet, then gradually concedes as he gets older until he ends up accepting any bride at all (the analogy is figurative and isn’t meant to belittle anyone).

Intensity of competition: in our era competition is at its peak. As a general rule, the more service/product providers there are, the higher the consumer’s expectations, and vice versa. Notice that when you deal with government agencies, you significantly lower your expectations and try to manage your composure no matter how dissatisfied you are with the service, just so you can get through a transaction handled by a single (monopoly) provider.

Level of responsibility: when the recipient of the service or product is responsible for delivering it to others, their expectations become much higher. For instance, if you’re hosting guests for dinner and the restaurant lets you down, will your reaction be the same as if you’d been eating alone and the same had happened? The point is that expectations here are collective (an accumulation of the expectations of all the end beneficiaries of the service/product), not only those of the person who placed the order or paid for it. The same applies to the father who takes his family on a holiday: the expectations of every member of his family affect their judgement of the service level, not just the father’s. This paragraph is inspired by reference [2].

How Can We Identify the Current Expectations of Our Customers?

Every customer has a ceiling of expectations, a floor of expectations, and a limited tolerance band (zone of tolerance) in between. There is also what is known as universal expectations: those that are commonly understood by the majority of customers. For example, it is universally expected that government offices will provide toilets and waiting areas. Imagine the reaction of visitors if these basics suddenly came at a fee or were made available only to certain segments of society.

In the world of user experience, designers use the mental model (inspired by psychology) to make certain decisions about designing the user’s experience and interface.

To answer the section’s question: practitioners usually rely primarily on the Voice of Customer (VoC) programme and on marketing research to track these expectations on an ongoing basis (since they are variable, not fixed). You can also research from your desk multiple sources discussing baseline customer expectations (to give you a starting point).

What Are Customers’ Baseline Expectations?

They differ from one industry to another, although many overlap across industries. Run a Google search using keywords like:

  • Universal expectations in X industry
  • Basic expectations in Y industry

Then study the results, and you’ll discover a painful truth: in most companies, customers have baseline (universal) expectations that the company has failed to meet for years.

How Can Expectations Be Recalibrated?

Before thinking about recalibrating customer expectations, we need to think about the source of the problem (the gap) I mentioned at the start of the article. Picture it like the hole in the ozone layer. If we genuinely want to shrink this hole, or at least stop it widening, we should start by thinking about what’s making the gap grow. That includes overpromising in advertising or through sales reps, poor coordination between marketing and operations (marketing makes promises that operations can’t deliver on), and failure to follow the policies, procedures, and service standards previously agreed.

The next thing is to understand which factors most affect the widening of the gap. If we assumed that carbon emissions from cars were the biggest contributor (to the widening of the ozone hole), then our focus would become developing the electric car industry or scaling up biofuel research. In experiences, there are touchpoints that affect customer loyalty far more than others, such as the moments of truth and the touchpoints that fall under the peak-end rule. See also Moments That Matter.

In Eastern, patriarchal societies, we hear the saying, “Cut the head off the cat on the wedding night,” a sick patriarchal practice that’s about calibrating the bride’s expectations of married life through an intimidating and terrifying display. Likewise, basic military training in some Arab countries with compulsory service is notorious for applying this literally, with the recruit put through hell in the introductory course (to crush their expectations), so that anything they get afterwards during their military service feels acceptable. Obviously, these brutal, oppressive practices can’t be applied to customers in any way. I mention them only to illustrate the idea of “expectation calibration”.

The challenge of managing expectations is far harder for services than for products, because services are intangible. The involvement of the human element (unless they’re 100% automated) makes consistency in their level almost impossible to maintain. It’s important to recognise that customer expectations of services are heavily influenced by word of mouth and everything under that umbrella, like customer reviews published online and professional reviews from specialist bloggers.

The simple answer to this question, after the long preamble, is: companies have to pay more attention to experience design. A journey that was properly designed in advance won’t include practices that drive expectations up, like introducing a new service to customers without explaining its benefit, its purpose, or how to use it. That service will then turn into a negative point in the customer journey, despite good intentions. Take, for example, the Exit Express service that helps travellers leave airport car parks quickly by paying through dedicated machines before getting in the car and heading to the exit. Although the service is meant to make life easier for the customer, I really struggled the first time I had to use it, until an airport cleaner helped me figure it out. The point is, when the entire customer journey is designed in advance and the responsibilities of all stakeholders are defined for each channel and each touchpoint, one of these responsibilities will be, for example, educating customers and equipping them to understand and use the service. This may be a joint responsibility between the Customer Success and Marketing teams.

Now let’s say you’ve understood all your customers’ expectations and you also understand their sources and the influences that have shaped them (and most importantly: the company’s own promises). Your main task now becomes recalibrating expectations by reframing the promises differently, and perhaps having the transparency to apologise for not delivering the service the way it used to be, with reasons. Designing experiences well, and coordinating with all stakeholders in advance to make sure that what one department promises another department can deliver (and more) … promising less and delivering more is far better than failing to keep your promises. Several companies have recalibrated expectations and changed how they deliver. The free meals on board flights have become paid options on several other airlines. Other companies have put service guarantees in place that ended up exhausting them, like the promise to deliver pizza within 30 minutes, with a 50% discount if delivery exceeds that time. Other companies have put a customer service charter in place to embody their promises to customers on service levels. They then publish, with full transparency, an end-of-year report showing their level of commitment to that charter, apologising where they have fallen short and explaining how they will fix it going forward.

In Closing

The gap and the process of shrinking it isn’t that simple. Some companies succeed at identifying their customers’ expectations but fail to calibrate them. Others don’t care about the gap in the first place, because their entire focus is on acquiring new customers rather than retaining existing ones. There are companies that are addicted to gut-based decisions, where the call is made on the basis of personal assumptions. And there are other decision-makers who classify customer expectations as illogical or impractical and adopt the principle that “satisfying customers is a goal you can never reach.” So the gap widens, and the door swings wide open for decision-makers’ guesswork to destroy the company. Then there are other companies with great standards on identifying and managing expectations, but execution on the ground doesn’t match those standards. There’s a lot to say on the subject of managing expectations, but this article was only meant to shine a light on this important topic. And with God lies the right path.

References

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