MARKETING STRATEGIES: Resetting customer expectations

If you decide to change your product or services functionality or benefits, you need to go about this in a carefully orchestrated manner so that existing customers fully appreciate the change and new customers understand what they are getting.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with reducing the benefits on a product or service, providing you make sure that repeat customers and new customers understand the change.

For example, you might announce that you are no longer able to supply certain products because your supplier is no longer manufacturing those products.

A bar might announce that it is changing over to plastic glasses to cut down on the amount of broken glass. A help desk might move from a help queue to a set response time to provide more reliable response times.

The last thing we want as a vendor is a disappointed customer. Not only do they not buy again but they also have a habit of telling lots of other people how disappointed they were. A good reputation hard won can be easily lost.

There are situations where it is worth setting out, at the time of purchase, exactly what is being delivered or what outcomes can be expected. Often multiple discussions with different parties on both the vendor and customer side can give mixed messages or both parties make assumptions about the outcomes without clarifying these. You often see this with projects which require quotations.

I recall having problems with selling large-scale ERP applications where modifications were required. We would be some way into the project when the customer would ask for a specific function to be demonstrated. To their surprise, our system did not support that function.

What I realised later was that, with several competitors demonstrating products, the customer sometimes forgot what was shown in each of the different vendor products. Their recall of what they had purchased was often out of line with what they had purchased. After this had happened to me several times, I instigated a post purchase review to ensure we all started on the same page. Better to confront the problem at the start where you can reset the expectations or redo the deal if necessary. A project which goes off track due to misaligned expectations is usually a disaster.

Your task is to use the means at your disposal to clearly set out the customer outcome you expect to create from a purchase of your product or service. You should be doing this across your marketing literature and through testimonials, blog responses, website content and sales engagements.

There is nothing wrong with occasionally exceeding customer expectations, provided it does not reset the expectation. Thus a car upgrade due to the shortage of cars in your requested size, a treat from the chef because it is the your birthday or a phone call from the business owner to congratulate you on an event in your life are all surprises, but they do not become obligations.

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.