Keeping your word
One of the most important aspects to delivering a terrific customer experience is the ability to keep a promise. The most obvious way to keep your word is clearly communicating honest truth about what you can offer. Another way is offering the best way for a customer to find the maximum benefit or savings when working with you, even though it might not equate to making you the most money initially. Delivering something on-time, on-budget with the quality and features they were expecting is yet another way to manage the customer’s expectations. You can also decline or offer an alternative if the customer has an expectation that isn’t realistic or just a bad way to approach the situation. If you can’t meet their expectations communicate that fact and offer an solution to part of their problem you can wholeheartedly deliver on.
Nobody’s perfect. No one expects any service to be 100% flawless all of the time. The world is unpredictable. We try like hell to keep our promises and endlessly apologize when we can’t come through. All that a customer wants is the dependability and honesty that they deserve. That they are paying for. If things happen that will impact their expectations they want to know that they can trust you to inform them. That you’ll make your best efforts to keep it from happening again in the future. Try not falling on your sword and make a decision to end the relationship on the customer’s behalf. They have the right to choose the punishment for not meeting their expectations. Not you. You could make things worse by not allowing them to decide. Quitting because you can’t deliver or meet their expectations is much worse than admitting that you’ve tried and it may need more money/effort/time to meet their desire.
That’s it. It is really simple stuff.
Keeping your word is so important to creating long lasting relationships with customers and receiving positive recommendations that will provide new opportunities. Instead of sugar coating it, coming up with another excuse or just finding a way to omit the truth. Consider keeping your word and really making the effort to go above and beyond to do so. I assure you that it will mean all the difference in the world to your customers and will help you build a legendary reputation.
Posted on Jul 23, 2010 by Kevin Milden
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