Customer satisfaction is a result of the service level you deliver compared to what your customer expects to receive.

Here are the four benefits you can get from understanding customer expectations:

It lets you know what service levels are expected to keep customers happy and achieve high customer satisfaction

It enables employees to focus on fulfilling customers’ expectations

It gives you the opportunity to exceed expectations and create raving advocates

It can help you resolve customer complaints. Since complaints are a result of failing to meeting expectations, you have the ability to quickly fix the problems and retain the business

Understanding your customers’ needs

Excellent customer service means different things to different customers. In order to understand what your customers feel is a good level of service, you first need to ask them. Find out what your customer wants from your product or service. Now work out how and whether you can meet those needs.

That might well be the case, so you must ensure your product or service is priced accordingly so you can meet needs while being profitable. Something might have to give, but remember the minute you start not meeting customer’s needs, that’s when you risk losing their business.

Most customers have a set of basic needs that they want from a service, make sure you understand them and work them into your customer service strategy.

Setting customer expectations

Right from the first contact you have with a customer it’s important to set expectations

Once you now know what your customer needs, you can begin setting expectations. Here you can tell customers what service levels they can expect to receive, what support is available to them and what results they should be getting. Every industry and even every customer might have a different set up expectations. This is because there needs will be different, so you must adjust accordingly.

Meeting customer expectations

Meeting customer expectations is the most valuable part of customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer is one that has had their expectations met. To do this, you must make sure you deliver a consistent level of service that is based on the key areas you have set for each customer when you set expectations.

Fixing and resetting customer expectations

From time to time you are going to fail to meet customers’ expectations. It’s the nature of the beast. There are a number of reasons why this might happen from poor customer service, under-trained staff, expectations set incorrectly, or even growing pains where expectations have changed.

The key is how, you go about acknowledging you have stuffed up and how you put systems in place to fix and reset customer expectations. What I like to recommend is immediately when you have find out that you’ve failed to meet expectations is to call your customer. Get the complete picture of what’s going on and try to tee up a face to face meeting. This shows that you really care about their business.