Setting expectations and delivering upon these expectations results in good customer experience. If your organisation successfully manages customer expectations, you'll reach a GOOD customer experience. If your organisation delivers above the set expectations you'll be able to deliver a GREAT customer experience. Setting conservative (and thus realistic!) expectations and delighting your customer by performing better is the key to great customer experience and hence customer loyalty.

Ideally expectations are managed on two levels: expectations on your products & services and expectations on the overall buying process.

Expectation management on your products & services

During the buying cycle you make certain promises upon what your products and services will be and upon what impact they will have for your buyer's organisation. overpromising will typically result in dissolutions later in the customer journey.

If you sell physical products:

You set expectations by describing your product in detail or by making sure that your customer gets to see the product prior to buying it. Focus on the impact buying your product will have on the organisation of your buyer, because that is ultimately what your customer cares about. Detailing out the KPIs to measure the impact during the buying cycle will make it easier for your organisation and your buyer to verify whether you delivered upon expectations.

You deliver upon these expectations by making sure your product works as you described it would work and by helping your customer measure and realise the promised impact.

If however you have a very complex or tailor made product, this is more difficult. Proof of concepts or pilot projects can help out in setting the right expectations on your product. The more complex your product is, the bigger the pitfall is to overpromise certain aspects of your product. Take into account that your customer might take certain assumptions upon how the product will work and hence certain expectations that might not be valid.

If you sell physical products you almost always also sell add-on services in some from like: support services, delivery services, implementation services etc. Managing expectations towards these services is key to improve the overall customer experience.

If you sell services:

You set expectations by clearly describing the impact of your services: what will your customer reach when buying your services, how will they be able to measure the impact. Detail the deliverables to the largest extend possible. Do also devote time to how you'll deliver the services itself: what ressources from the customer do you need to successfully deliver your services, what assumptions did you take,..

You deliver upon expectations by delivering the expected impact within time and budget. Visualising this towards your customer helps in boosting the customer experience, a person can only be happy about what they know.

Service productisation can help in managing expectations. You pre-package your services into logical groups, per "service product" you define your deliverables and your impact. Service productisation is a scalable path to customer experience as it allows you not to start from scratch every time you need to manage expectations for a customer.

Expectation setting on the buying process

Optimising customer interactions is a great way to improve customer experience. Making sure that your prospect knows what the expected outcome of the customer interaction will be for him/her and delivering upon that promise is key to boost customer experience prior to buying. How can you do this:

By explaining to your customer what the steps are in the buying process and how your organisation will guide them through it. e.g. when certain other people in their organisation need to be involved, when you'll help in detailing out a business case, when you'll deep-dive in your product,..

For each customer interaction set a clear goal and communicate that goal together with the agenda to your customer.

Collaborate internally to make sure all employees of your organisation interact with your customer according to the set expectations.

To conclude: setting and delivering upon expectations only results in good customer experience. Good customer experience is the basics, great customer experience is remembered. Delighting your customer above the set expectations is what will result in great customer experience, and hence customer loyalty.

Contact Ineke if you want to analyse customer expectation setting for your organisation