Week 12 - What Do Your Customers Expect From You?

Take a moment now and look through the Yellow Pages or do a generic search on Google for your product. Go ahead and look under electrical contractors or exhaust systems or gardening services. How many companies are telling you about extra services they provide and how they are unique, special or different? Perhaps not surprisingly, there are only one or two. Everyone else is just screaming ME TOO. Me too takes many forms such as “24 hours”, “all services”, “guaranteed” and “all models”.

Customers have expectations, that is, there are certain things they just expect when making a purchase of anything.

They expect to be treated with dignity. They expect that the sheets in a hotel will be clean. They expect that a hot dish in a restaurant will in fact be hot. The point here is that many business owners offer services they consider special, but the market simply considers that they are part of the normal service.

Expected:

Friendly Service
Competitive Prices
Home Delivery
All areas
Frequent Flyer Miles

Unexpected:

Free carpet cleaning
Theatre tickets with hotel stay
Genuine discount at leading restaurant (not just a free dessert with a $75 main course!)
A free birthday cake delivered on your special day
A call from a restaurant to see how your meal was

You have to keep on top of what’s expected and what’s not. As I said earlier if your competitors are any good they will start doing the same things so you need to constantly look at ways to surprise and delight your customers.

How many of your current extras are just “expected” by the market?