On Customer Care:
We satisfy our customers when we meet their expectation and disappoint them when we do not meet their expectations.
This leads to my question??
Do we really know what our customers expect at every stage of their interaction with our organizations?
Customer Expectation- Is perceived value that client seeks from the purchase of a product or service, a perception influenced by experience, advertisements and competitor awareness.
When this happens, most in management think, that if a client is disappointed a front line staff is responsible. Unfortunately this is not the case “Most customer disappointments go beyond the frontline staff and mirror unmet expectations from various corners of the organization.
John A. Goodman, In his book “ Strategic customer service “ states that 50-60 per cent of unmet expectations are from defective products or services, misleading marketing messages, ineffective policies, or broken internal processes, with employee mistakes contributing only 20-30 per cent and customer errors and unreasonable expectations accounting for remaining 20-30 per cent.
Putting in mind, that bad news spreads faster than good news, dissatisfied clients share experiences with 9-12 other persons while those whose expectations are exceeded tell 3-4 persons. This is where Smart companies seek to understand their customers’ expectations. Therefore developing a system for capturing and managing unmet expectations and use this feedback to improve their product and service quality.
According to Lucy Kiruthu, Customer Service Consultant, Setting a Customer Service department, does not sort out unmet expectations, this has led many organizations today not to reap the full benefits of a well thought out customer focused strategy.
A Customer Service Department key role is to be the main point of contact for customers, to feed back the organization on unmet expectations and their causes with everyone in the organization playing their part to meet customer expectations.
In Support of the article, A must read is the Success Story of Enterprise Rent A Car in Kirk Kazanjian’s book titled “Exceeding Customer Expectations”
