Should You Exceed Expectations or Not?
Blog carnivals are a great way of getting your blog out there, creating some link love and generating. Hopefully the Carnival of Entrepreneurs does that for people who submit their articles.
Meanwhile, please take a look at the Carnival of Customer Support
My post, The Value of a Customer Complaint, is featured there along with a number of other excellent posts.
One post in particular from Tamar Weinberg caught my eye: Going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty. It’s a simple message – do more than expected – and earn praise, thanks, appreciation and more business. Tamar is referencing a post by Seth Godin titled, This must be hard, where he points out how easy it would be for people to follow up with their customers and gain so much more business.
Tamar’s post stood out for me because I recently read a much different opinion. Charles Green says, “don’t exceed expectations“.
Say what now? I shouldn’t try and exceed expectations? Is Charles nuts?
The best line in his entire post is this:
One who always exceeds expectations is a liar.
Charles’s main point is that to exceed expectations means you may be purposefully setting them too low. When you exceed your too-low expectations you look like a superstar. But you’re lying. And degrading trust with your customers.
Charles has a point. Manufacturing false expectations that are obviously too low only to try and look like superstars after the fact is a bad move. The Canadian government constantly does it with budget surpluses. “We expect to have $5 in the bank this year as a surplus.” When the end of the year comes they re-jig the numbers, “Wow! We rock! We have $5,000,000,000 in the bank as a surplus!” (You don’t rock, you’re just stealing too much money from taxpayers…)
My take is this — when most people think of the concept of “exceeding expectations” they’re referencing a much bigger group, an entire industry for example. They’re not talking about the specific expectations set by one company. In cases like that, when a company sets lower expectations only to try and look like winners when they beat those expectations, I do agree with Charles, you’re degrading trust.
But when you look at an entire industry and what’s come to be expected from that industry (products, services, customer service, etc.) there are ways of exceeding expectations.
And you should do them.
Have Some Fun!
Both thoughts may be correct under the right circumstances. It depends on whether you are setting the expectation or the expectation is already established by common perception.
For example, big software vendors are notorious for bad customer service (even though customers pay incredible prices for it), so if you really perform great service you are exceeding your customers _perceived_ expectation and that is good.
On the other side, if I am say a software developer and I always say it will take me 3 months to do something and I always finish it in 2 weeks, then that is bad and no one will really trust just my judgment.
Somewhere in between is the ‘Scotty’ effect — Scotty from Star Trek –, where a high profile project or emergency comes up and you aren’t sure it can be done and communicate that fact, then pull off the ‘miracle’, you are a hero. Just don’t do it too often :-)
Nice discussion. I think Ben and Robert have it quite right. I certainly dind’t mean in my original post to denigrate the idea of doing great things, or of surprises, or of above and beyond–I’m totally in favor of those things.
Just as long as they’re not cynically pre-planned, and that they’re the result of genuine work, hence somewhat random; as you both point out.
As an innkeeper, this really hits home (pun intended)… we have a standard operating procedure(SOP) that we go through when guests who eventually leave as friends/family get when they arrive.
We strive for hospitality service actually though we did have one guest that short of giving a first born couldnt be made happy.
I agree with Robert on setting the “bar”..I was dealing with a software company that were awful on a good day.. i wont buy a thing again from them. Then a bank/mortgage company who revamped their customer service and have renewed my faith in them with “guarded optimism”. :)
GP in Montana
The best blog which I saw
guten tag