Meet your customers' expectations

Have you ever had a bad experience with buying a product or service that you wish you never had?

I'm sure that's happened to us all and one of the biggest fears that your customers are going to have is that they're going to make the wrong decision as they part with their money and later realise that it was a bad investment.

Minimise this happening by taking an objective look at your programme at each stage your customers will go through.

Where are the possible areas that could cause friction?

Look at it from their point of view, not yours.

Think of programmes you’ve been through and what you liked and didn’t like about them. Does your programme have some of those negative elements?

Let me give you an example of what I mean and how this could go wrong. The more expensive a programme you are offering, the more expectations your customers are going to have. But equally, if they are paying a small amount and are dissatisfied, they are likely not to complain but just leave and never come back. At least if you have a complaint, you can do something to improve the programme.

I've recently bought a course and it was a really expensive programme, the most I've invested in a single course ever. So, with that investment comes very high expectations of the value that's going to be delivered and, in my personal experience, I'm fairly happy with the value so far. I can see that the reasons they made the decisions they made and the business model they chose and I think it's a good business model. However, there are things that could be improved.

As we moved to a new portion of the course, we were introduced to our personal coaches. Only, for my cohort, it wasn’t as personal as we had been led to believe. Our first “live” group session with the coach turned out to be a prerecorded video played live, and in the follow up Q&A a few days later, the coach was replaced by someone else, so we didn’t even have any interaction with our coach on week 1.

The natural reaction, especially given the price of the course, is to feel shortchanged. Then when he showed up for the Q&A that second week (again the first “live” session was prerecorded) he opened himself up to a bit of criticism from one of the ladies who was obviously quite angry at the service shortcomings.

To make matters worse, he didn't leave enough time in the Q&A to address her question. Not a good start.

So, make sure that you deliver what was promised in the way promised.

If you're offering a premium product, how are you going to deliver that product in a way that it remains a premium product with premium delivery as well.

Make your customers feel it's worth it by setting expectations. If we’d been told that the delivery of the first session each week would be prerecorded and the Q&As would be live, our expectations would have been met. If that happens, then there's no cause for argument. But if you promise your clients a personal coach and that personal coach will be with them live twice a week and they're actually not, then you're opening yourself up for a lot of complaints coming through.

So, think about that as you are planning your programmes just to make sure that you're giving a good experience. Keep the conversation open with your clients so that if they feel shortchanged in some way, you don’t leave them festering, especially when they paid a lot of money.

You don’t want your programme to gain a bad reputation and you want your clients to have a wonderful experience.