Exceeding Customer Expectations
Exceeding Customer Expectations
Continuing on from our previous issue with the theme of customer services, we discuss how to exceed your clients´ expectations so you can build loyal customers for the future. By Helen Cummins
Quality of Service Definition Delivering quality to clients in highly competitive markets may not be sufficient to generate customer loyalty into the future, as competitors try to match or exceed your service quality. Therefore to ensure that your customers return again and again and recommend your organisation to their network of contact, you must strive to exceed your customers´ expectations. How to exceed your customer’s expectations Using this underlying principle, Rosenbluth build a 96% client retention rate. How did they achieve this? Rosenbluth attributes the success of their business to putting their employees above everything else: the employees are cared for, valued, empowered, and motivated to care for their clients. The effect is that the employees are inspired to provide a level of service that comes from the heart, thereby exceeding the customers’ normal experiences. In Ireland, a supermarket owner by the name of Fergal Quinn has managed to differentiate his chain of supermarkets from competitors by being customer-driven. In Quinn’s book ‘Crowing the Customer King’, he tells a story of when he was a boy working in his father’s all-inclusive holiday resort: “The fact was that when guests arrived, we had made as much money from their visit as we were going to make. No matter how hard we worked to give them a good time, we would not increase our profit from their stay. So why did we work so hard to create the best holiday experience for our visitors? The reason was we wanted them to come back”. Quinn refers to this as The Boomerang Principle. Running a business on this basis can radically change the way you do business; your objectives are different, your strategy is different, and the way you judge your results is different. As an island heavily dependent on repeat business from holiday makers, how well is Mallorca performing in exceeding customers’ expectations? Well, first we must ask, what are the expectations of our customers? And who and what are our competitors offering? Once we have done this research we can set about meeting these expectations with the goal of exceeding visitors’ expectations in the long-term. Conclusion
Services are heterogeneous, as their performance often varies from employee to employee, from customer to customer and from time to time. Consistency in the service provided is difficult to maintain for these reasons.
Service quality involves a comparison of the customer’s expectations with the actual service provided. In other words, how well did the service quality delivered match the customer’s expectations? Delivering quality service means meeting the customer’s expectations on a consistent basis. Research shows the existence of a link between service quality and customers loyalty to the service provider.
As customers’ expectations grow, merely meeting their expectations may not be enough.
The starting point begins with your employees – how prepared are your employees to go that extra mile to satisfy your customers? Are they given incentives to exceed customers´ expectations? In the famous book by Hal Rosenbluth ‘The Customer comes Second,’ the CEO of Rosenbluth Travel, believes that the transformation of his small family business into a multi-million dollar global industry leader was based on the basic belief of putting their employees – not their customers – first.
Organisations who adapt the principles of empowering their employees by putting them before all else and focussing the organisation on customer retention, rather than short-term results, can exceed not only their customers´ expectations but also their companies´ anticipated growth long into the future.
