The saying goes that happy customers are the best marketing opportunity for your business. When you operate a small business, you strive to create good relationships with your prospects and customers (or clients). Their positive experiences can translate to positive word of mouth. By the same token, their negative experiences can hurt your momentum. But sometimes what is seen as a negative experience is actually an unmet expectation. This is something that – as business owners – we can help to prevent. Let’s talk about happy customers and managing expectations.
Did you ever go into an interaction expecting one thing and then getting another? The disappointment, the surprise of being left with a result that fell short of what you thought you would get, can leave a bad taste in your mouth. It can make you revisit your whole experience with a new point of view. Even if you were never promised the outcome you were anticipating, the sting is still real.
When you are representing your business, it is important to remember this so you can get in front of the expectations being created. You want the evaluations of your products and services to be rooted in reality. On what you know you can deliver. So, part of the customer service process to create happy customers may require managing expectations up front. You can tell your customer what to expect and reframe their understanding BEFORE they embark on the next step of the process.
You can tell your customer what to expect and reframe their understanding BEFORE they embark on the next step of the process. #customerservice #smallbusiness #smallbiz #biztips Share on XLet’s say you are in a negotiation. You are about to come to a term that you think your prospect will not love. Perhaps they wanted a quick turnaround, and you know it will take a month to get them what they need at the right quality. In this situation, managing their expectations might involve anchoring them with the longer timeline up front and acknowledging the situation for what it is to get their buy-in before you continue the conversation. You might say, “I know you want a quick turnaround on this. You’re going to think this is far too slow, and that my proposed timeline is too conservative. I will need a month to do this job the right way and to make sure everything is vetted properly.”
In this case, you started by recognizing what they want and labeling how they may feel about what you are about to say. Now they are waiting to hear how conservative your conservative proposed deadline is. Maybe they already came up with a worse timeline in their head and began to brace themselves. Managing expectations in this way not only softens the timeline you propose, but this whole framework sets you up for them to come out of this conversation with a more realistic understanding of what you can execute.
Years ago, I did a project with a client to create a marketing funnel for her business. This is a strategic project that is meant to give you a framework for your marketing plan, showing you how you meet your leads for the first time, how you maintain contact with them and put systems in place in your business, and how you drive them forward with calls to action to advance through your funnel until they become your best customer. The exercise charts the customer journey so that more people can get further into your pipeline, yielding more sales, revenue, and referrals. Our businesses change every year, so this marketing funnel exercise is meant to be a strategic planning tool that you revisit each year to assess your business and your systems and find solutions to problems.
At the end of the exercise, my client was disappointed. She was frustrated that the exercise had elicited questions about her business that she had to ask me for further clarification. She thought that was a failing that I hadn’t anticipated her questions. And she was expecting a finished, final product – not a working document. She was disappointed, yet she had achieved my intended outcome.
I had to think carefully about this. In that moment, explaining that her experience was the purpose of the exercise was too late. She had other expectations, and digging my heels in about the original intent of the exercise was not serving her as a customer. Yet, to me it had been a success that she unearthed questions about her business that forced us to talk about how to make improvements in her systems. And, to me, handing her a working document meant that she could now take ownership of her strategy and make her own revisions as her business changed. In my experience, an exercise like this leads to immediate experimentation with business processes that can require you to change the funnel again in half a year or less.
What she had been expecting as a client and what I was planning to deliver had never been the same thing.
Since that time, I have taken this learning on to the other clients I served with the marketing funnel project. My process and deliverables have not fundamentally changed, but how I manage their expectations has.
When I have a client considering this project, I am up front in explaining that this exercise is intended to show them areas for improvement – small or large – in their marketing plan. It is meant to highlight when systems or processes need to be created to nurture their audience or when the tasks they are doing are not helping them. I encourage them to take notes of all their questions as we work, both when we are working together and when they have homework to do do, so that we can address them together in our next session. I am also clear that the deliverable will be a working document. I tell them that I update my own funnel once a year, but in the first couple years I had to update it every six months while I was making a lot of changes in my business.
The result? When clients sign on for this project, they know exactly what to expect. Reality is now in alignment with what they envisioned, and they are far more likely to be happy with the result.
Managing expectations can be done in many ways. In a world where we value closing the sale – sometimes above all other aspects of the sales and customer service process – being transparent from the start about what your customers can really expect may seem like a risky choice. Maybe you are worried that when your customers have the facts in front of them, they won’t want what you offer. Maybe. But, I have found, the reward is greater than the risk. The people who end up staying your customers after you’ve managed expectations are likely to be more satisfied.
The people who end up staying your customers after you've managed expectations are likely to be more satisfied. #customerservice #smallbusiness #smallbiz #biztips Share on XWe’re in business for the long haul. If satisfied customers are happy customers, and if happy customers can generate more positive word of mouth, wouldn’t you rather set yourself up for those wins down the road?
Interested to learn more about customer service? Read here for my Marketing Tip of the Week on “Customer Service Is the Little Details.”