Satisfying your customers is a good thing, and it absolutely beats the alternative. In most environments, though, “satisfying” falls far short of where you need to be.
In the book “Raving Fans“, the authors argue for this very point:
Blanchard and Bowles argue that there’s a clear distinction between satisfying your customers and exceeding the expectations of your customers. If you merely seek to satisfy your customers, they’ll only stay with you as long as you’re not worse than the competition. However, if you invest in the customer service experience to exceed expectations and build trust, your customers will be so impressed and happy that they’ll willingly contribute to your success.
In the book they share the story of a very popular gas station and the simple focus behind it:
In Raving Fans, the owner of the successful gasoline station explains how to continually surprise and delight your customers: Always deliver more than you promise.
This is key, but it can be tough. Essentially, to pull that off, you need to under-promise. That’s great when you’re in the midst of a project, but then selling the project in the first place becomes much trickier.
I remember a few years ago we were talking to someone who needed a website built fairly quickly, and I told her it’d be around 12 weeks to build (which was accurate). She insisted she needed it more quickly, so I talked through it with the team, figured out where we could shave a bit of time, and got it down to nine weeks. It would have been a stretch, but I knew we could pull it off. That wasn’t good enough, so she went with someone that said they could do it in six weeks.
The site launched 23 weeks later.
Solving that one is tricky. As long as people are willing to stretch the truth to make a sale, they’re hard to beat. The antidote to that is trust. If you spend the time to build up trust with your potential customers, they’re no longer going to try to shave a week off here or there. If people are searching specifically for our company (rather than something like “web design companies in Atlanta”), that’s a huge first step.
It’s like the story of how we chose our CPA firm. When it came time to make the hire, I didn’t search for “CPA firms for creative agencies”, I searched for “Jason Blumer”.
Because Jason came in with that kind of head start (at least in our mind), he been able to take opportunities to surprise and delight us over the years.
Satisfying your customers is table stakes, but delivering more than they expect can turn them into raving fans.
