All businesses want to exceed their customers’ expectations, but do you truly understand the importance of this and how you can achieve it?
To maintain a successful business, you need customers who enjoy their journey. It’s critical that you understand this and truly exceed the expectations on every customer’s journey.
What are customer expectations?
Customer expectations are what a customer expects to receive with a product or service, and this can be delivered in a tangible or intangible way. Most customers will seek out expectations before interacting with the business and expect them to be met. These expectations can either be high or low, so it’s always important to push for the best customer service so you can exceed their expectations.
Why are customer expectations important?
Knowing what your customers expect from each product or service you deliver to them is crucial. This allows you to ensure you meet or hopefully exceed their expectations, leading to an increase in a positive reputation for your business.
Why is exceeding customer expectations important for your business?
By exceeding your customers’ expectations each time they interact with you, you can guarantee repeat purchases, loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth. By having one customer enjoy their customer journey exceptionally, you can make a large impact on your business.
When customers’ expectations are exceeded, they are likely to spend 140% more with a business.
How do customers form expectations?
Customer expectations are formed at all different stages of their journey, mostly before the customer has even bought anything. If you have a direct competitor for your business, your potential customer will most likely be comparing both and choosing who to go with.
The customer will have the expectation that you will match or exceed your competitor. So, it’s important to be aware of your competitors and how you can outperform them on the customer service side. If you fail, they are mostly likely to give the business to the competitor, so always ensure your customer service is impeccable.
They may have had a bad experience with your business in the past or have identified poor reviews online, leaving them with low expectations. This gives you the opportunity to prove the customer wrong, allowing you to overdeliver on their expectations.
How can your business exceed customer expectations?
Customers are the main fuel for running a successful business, so it’s important to keep them happy and exceed expectations each time they return. This can be achieved by:
Personalisation.
Make them feel like they are the one and only customer, creating a sense of importance.
Quality customer service.
Producing a customer-centric feel when dealing with customers and ensuring you let them know that they matter to your business. By placing focus on your customers, your enterprise could become 60% more successful from this alone.
Low effort and quick experiences.
Ensure that your customers can gain experience or purchase a product with minimal effort. Time is money in the customer's eyes, so create ease throughout your customers' journey.
Easy-to-use platforms.
Communication and purchasing on your business’s platforms should be easy to access and use. With different generations using your platforms, it’s vital that they are user-friendly.
Meeting customers needs.
When running a business, it’s vital to not falsely advertise and ensure that your service or product truly meets the expectations your business sets. This is the most important part, as you will once again have no business without a good-quality product or service.
How can you exceed customer expectations?
Know what your customers’ expectations are. Awareness of your customers' journeys is critical, and knowing when they expect it will allow you to succeed in exceeding their expectations. You can discover this by simply asking customers to fill out reviews and questionnaires about their experience with you. This ensures that you can improve where needed later down the line and understand what you are doing correctly and incorrectly.
Focus on delivering customer-centric service. By delivering good customer service, it allows you to talk and show your care to customers, ensuring they are receiving exactly what they would expect. This can be achieved by maintaining regular staff training on new products and services and identifying the main morals of your business. Customers should always come first and be important; otherwise, you will have no business.
Measure your results.
Read back the questionnaires and reviews and measure your success by having more quality customer service than sales. Having a customer-centric attitude within your business allows you and your staff to identify the importance of customers and why you should exceed their expectations. You can create an action plan and goals if you are still not at your required level of success.
Succeed in exceeding.
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