Excellent customer service and high customer satisfaction must start with understanding customer expectations. You need to know who your customers are and what they want.

When measuring customer satisfaction, companies generally ask customers whether their product or service has met or exceeded expectations. This is an important question to ask and is a key factor behind satisfaction.

Customers expect service basis

There is a perceived expectation that every customer has when going into a business relationship. For example, a hotel customer thinks that when they pay more they expect more.

The service process is the key to exceeding expectations

Companies are supposed to be accurate and dependable and provide the service they promised. It’s unlikely for a hotel to exceed customer expectations if they only just have the customers room ready. The opportunity lies in the ability to surprise the customer with an uncommon swiftness, face, courtesy, competence, commitment, or understanding.

Customer expectations are duel-leveled

Customers’ expectations have two levels: desired and sufficient. The desired level is the service the customer hopes to obtain while the sufficient level is the service which the customer finds acceptable.

Customers want relationships

Relationships are important to customers. Many of the customers interviewed want to be relationship customers, they want ongoing, personalized relationship with the same representative from the company. They want a company representative to contact them, rather than always having to initiate contact themselves.

Manage promises

To manage expectations, companies can first start managing their promises. Observers recommend deliberately under-promising the service to increase the likelihood of exceeding customer expectations. This is something I regularly recommend to our customers all the time. There’s nothing worse than over-promising and under-delivering! Keep in mind that there are some risks with under promising as it can reduce your competitive appeal, so make sure you are aware of your competitive environment.

It is essential for businesses to manage customer satisfaction. To be able do this, firms need a reliable way to measure satisfaction. A customers’ expectation is that metric.

A lot can go wrong during your business relationship with customers; it’s necessary to make sure you are always thinking about setting expectations, meeting expectations or resetting expectations.