Promise and expectation alignment
In the last month, I’ve been involved in two workshops to elicit feedback on customer expectations. Interestingly both were within member organisations. One workshop I designed and facilitated, in the other, I was a delegate, and as such, it was interesting to sit on the other side of the table for a change.
Every organisation, whether a membership organisation, a food manufacturer or a professional services firm, creates in its clients an expectation. It does this through the expression of its promise. This expectation may be written and specific, or unwritten and implied.
Expectation confirmation theory shows us that the attributes or characteristics we anticipate or predict from our relationship with an organisation, influence the perceived performance of the experience. It is those expectations that determine whether we feel satisfied or unsatisfied with the experience.
It stands to reason therefore that if your customers or clients have expectations which do not align with your promise there will be some level of dissatisfaction over the experience.
It’s like booking an all-inclusive holiday and when you get there discovering you have to pay extra for certain alcoholic beverages.
So what is the purpose of customer expectation gathering?
The danger is to think that the purpose of gathering customer expectations is to define your organisation’s promise. If organisations allow their promise to be created by consensus, they run the risk of diluting their message and in trying to be all things to all people they will fail to meet anybody’s expectations.
“Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.”
All too often what comes out of these sessions is an awareness that your promise is not well understood. This manifests in the following ways:
Expectations are expressed as new ideas, despite the fact you are already delivering these.
Expectations are unrealistic, have never been and never will be part of your promise because that’s not part of your aspiration
Expectations are aligned with the promise and experience is not living up to this – this indicates the promise is not well understood internally with those who are charged to deliver it
Of course, there will always be new thinking generated in these forums. The challenge for leaders is to ensure that the adoption of new ideas is aligned to the existing promise and does not start to dilute the overall message.
You could argue that Airbnb is guilty of this. The peer-to-peer travel accommodation service was established in 2008 by three guys in San Francisco who were attending a conference and couldn’t afford to pay for their housing. They rented out part of their apartment in order to pay for the trip. When they set up their platform, they wanted to change the way people thought about travel accommodation – rather than opting for expensive and frequently sterile mass-market hotel rooms, they wanted to give people the opportunity to ‘forget hotels’ and ‘travel like a human’ by staying with hosts in more affordable and more personal environments.
Fast forward to 2019 and many cities are struggling with the number of properties in their cities that are owned purely to rent out via AirBnB. Contrary to the personal, hosted experience originally intended, many of these properties are now furnished sparsely with uninspired, minimalist furniture, and accessed by key-safe without the hosts ever getting involved.