Just the other day was the first day of “spring soccer”; it was also my family’s first experience with a new soccer league. Unfortunately, I expected something I didn’t get. I expected organized chaos with a kind spirit of “it’s all about the kids”. I got chaos with a tint of “the kids matter the most when they win”. After reflecting a little on my attitude at the end of practice it dawned on me that I’m experiencing a core question of any customer experience: did you “get” what you expected?
There are two essential elements to this question, your expectations and what you actually experienced. If you have a tendency to think of things mathematically (who am I kidding, I’m a geek) you could create a formula that has your expectations in the denominator and your experience in the numerator.
So in simple terms, if you expected a 4 star experience and you got a 2 star experience you could say that your customer experience was 2/4 or 1/2 (or crappy if you wanted to say it bluntly). As a company, or an employee, or a partner we can provide a better customer experience in two ways. One is to meet the personal expectations of our customer, or boss, or partner. Since most of us are humans and periodically have bad days, meeting personal expectations of everyone can be a moving target (difficult).
Another more dependable option to providing a better customer experience is by managing your customer’s personal expectations. It can be as simple as “Be careful, this coffee is really hot”. Suddenly the customer has expectations as to what will happen on the first sip. The customer would then apply caution when drinking the hot beverage and by not burning her tongue you’ve improved her customer experience by magnitudes.
Sound simple? Well, apply this idea to more than hot coffee and burnt tongues and you’ll find (like I have) that customer experience opportunities are in every interaction we have with each other. Even this blog entry… Did you get what you expected?
