Exceeding Your Customers Expectations Is Possible

We all know that when it comes to business, competition is fierce. With dozens, hundreds or even thousands of companies offering similar products or services in your industry, to survive and be successful your business must stand out from the rest. In order to do this you need to have a unique selling point (USP) and one of the best USP’s that you can have is a fantastic reputation for exceeding customer expectations.

Businesses that go the extra mile to delight their customers create the ideal opportunity for them to tell the world what fantastic service they have received. Let’s face it, are you going to make the effort to go online and tell your social media followers that your package arrived as expected, on time and the service was simply satisfactory? Probably not. However, if you receive amazing customer support, your package arrives early or you have received a free gift or discount code in return for your custom then you are much more likely to shout about it. The reason for this is simply that the majority of companies are happy to just perform adequately. Unfortunately being adequate doesn’t get you noticed. Many people prefer to make purchases from businesses recommended to them by family, friends and colleagues, and acquiring and keeping a reputation for putting customers first will boost the organic growth of your company.

What are the key benefits of exceeding customer expectations?

In a nutshell:

• Once you find the area and method in which you are going to exceed customer expectations it is a relatively easy and inexpensive thing to do.
• It increases customer loyalty to your brand, meaning repeat business is significantly more likely. This in turn increases ‘Customer Lifetime Value’ (CLV) which represents the total expected revenue from each customer during their entire relationship with your business. Some companies have been known to generate the majority of their revenue purely through repeat business.
• It builds a strong brand and reputation. You become known as a reliable and trustworthy business that values its customers.
• Free advertising! As we have already said, exceeding customer expectations is one sure fire way to get your business mentioned both verbally and on social media as they share their positive experience with you. Happy customers can be just as effective as any expensive marketing campaign.

Ultimately by exceeding customer expectations you will be prompting them to return, spend and talk more, and all of these can have a positive effect on your business.

Customer Expectations – How to be satisfactory

In order to decide how to exceed customer expectations, you first need to understand what their expectations are. As a general rule, customers only expect satisfactory service. For example, at Hike POS , our primary goal is to make sure that support calls are answered in a timely manner, and the same applies to solving customers’ problems. They expect websites to be reasonably easy to navigate, products to match their description, and the checkout process to be straightforward and secure. They expect reasonable shipping costs and times, secure packaging and a fair returns policy. They expect knowledgeable, polite staff and good communication. Similarly, our product, iPad POS does the same for its users and even looks after their customers. For example, EMV deadline is approaching – Hike POS is already EMV ready. Our clients expect us to remain ahead of the trend, and for us, it’s also always about meeting expectations.

So when you think about it, there has got to be something in one of those processes that can be improved to make it conversation-worthy!

Customer Expectations – How to surprise and surpass them!

So we now know that customer expectations are really quite low. The next step is to understand the various ways in which customers interact with your business. This will help you identify which areas to target to provide an enhanced experienced.

These customer interaction points, which we will refer to as CIP’s, can include communications such as phone conversations; tweets and emails, visits to your website, making a purchase or making a return or exchange. Each of these CIP’s is an opportunity for you to surpass customer expectations and reap the associated benefits.

However it is important not to try and make too many changes at once. This can be expensive, confusing and time consuming. Too much change can also be off-putting for existing customers. Instead focus on making improvements to one CIP at a time. One of the easiest ways to do this is by breaking them down into different categories. This could be by stages in the purchasing process, for example pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase. Alternatively you may prefer to break them down by interaction type, for example social media communication, direct communication, receiving goods etc. Within these categories you can then break the interactions down further into individual processes.

We have designed the following table to help you understand them further. This is a general guideline that will need to be adapted to best suit the processes and requirements of your business.

Once these CIPs are broken down this way, you may be able to easily identify an area which you feel needs the most improvement and can focus on this as your opportunity to exceed expectations.

Examples of ways in which other businesses have gone the extra mile to create something surprising, original and conversation-worthy with their customers include a witty delivery email, thank you cards, beautifully packaged deliveries, and small, inexpensive gifts such as candies with their purchases. The critical thing here is to identify something that your typical customer would appreciate. There is no point putting stunning packaging on a delivery of sports equipment, nor is there any point sending out chewy candies to a target market of denture-wearers. If you have a shop floor, you could invest in cloud-based point of sale technology so that your customers can make a purchase without the need to queue or leave their chosen product. This would also allow you to provide comprehensive sales advice during the transaction. Speak to existing customers and brainstorm with your team to determine what method you should use to improve your customers’ experience.

Test Run your Wow Factor and Get Feedback!

Once you have established how you are going to delight your customers you need to do a test run of the entire process. You may choose to do this internally by undergoing the complete purchase experience through the eyes of a new customer yourself. Better yet you may be able to create a focus group of new customers who can go through the process and make a low value purchase – which they get to keep – in return for feedback on the experience. Whichever option you decide to choose for your test run, ensure that you ask the following questions:

Which, if any, areas of the process fell below your expectations?

Which, if any, areas of the process exceeded your expectations?

If so, would you share your experience and how? (At this point give your testers the option to choose from telephone, face to face and various social media sites).

This sort of feedback is extremely valuable in assessing what parts of the process are successful and which parts need more attention. Alongside any feedback you may receive during the test run, you can also use feedback tools such as Receiptful and Klaviyo to ask customers to rate their experience with you.

If you have successfully exceeded customer expectations then you should also see a spike in the number of social media interactions that mention your company. Responding to these by ‘liking’ them or providing comments of thanks also reinforces a positive brand message and makes those customers feel valued.

Conclusion

Any business is worth nothing without its customers and providing them with an enhanced experience is one way to increase the likelihood of success. Customers who feel valued will ultimately spend spend spend: spend more, spend more often and spend time talking to others about their experience with your company. Exceed their expectations and the success of your company could exceed beyond yours.