MARKETING STRATEGIES: Should you exceed your customers’ expectations?

The worst marketing slogan of the 20th century has to be “Exceed your customers’ expectations”. I think this did more damage to a large number of firms than any other marketing program. Let me explain why with some simple examples.

The restaurant

You sit down at your favourite restaurant and the waiter brings out a little pre-dinner treat – compliments of the chef. You are delighted.

The same thing happens the next two times you go to the restaurant. You are so pleased you have told all your friends. The next time you go, however, there’s no treat. You ask about its absence and are told the restaurant has stopped serving them.

You are very disappointed because you have come to expect it. While you may have an excellent meal and experience that night, you will still go away somewhat deflated, having missed out on something you have come to expect. In a small way, the restaurant has declined in your estimation – perhaps even gone backwards from when they served the first treat.

The helpdesk

Your software supplier ranks help requests according to the level of severity of the problem. Urgent problems are returned within an hour but less urgent problems are more likely to take 24 hours.

However in your recent experience, all your requests are being dealt with within two hours. Because of this, you have adjusted your own behaviour to report problems on the expectation that you will have a resolution within twohours.

Suddenly, your less urgent requests are taking 20-24 hours. You now find that your work is being impacted and so you phone the vendor for an explanation. They report that they were in a transition phase to a new product and had surplus help desk staff, so they put them to work on less urgent requests.

Business is back to normal now and the less urgent requests are taking longer to resolve. You understand but you are still not happy because you have become accustomed to a higher level of service.

Service discounts

In order to promote business, your local recruitment firm is aggressively seeking business and is offering a 10% discount from their normal fees to new customers. This program is in place for about three months and then the discount is removed.

New customers argue to keep it in place since you were more than happy to take the business at the discounted rate. Your old customers by this time have also found out about the discount and are asking for it to be applied to their business as well. Whatever you say to either of these parties is not going to make them happy.

If you take the view that one of the major objectives of your marketing strategy is to position your firm for a repeat sale or a referral, then you need to ensure that you align the customer experience with the customer expectation.

When your customer comes back for the second, third and fourth time, you need to ensure that they will leave satisfied each time.

The way to ensure that is to deliver a consistent product or service which matches their expectation. The same applies to a referral. You want the new customer to have a set of expectations which you can deliver so that they will have a satisfactory experience every time.

Tom McKaskill is a successful global serial entrepreneur, educator and author who is a world acknowledged authority on exit strategies and the former Richard Pratt Professor of Entrepreneurship, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. A series of free eBooks for entrepreneurs and angel and VC investors can be found at his site here.