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Contact Vox to learn about how we can help you create a comprehensive Customer Experience that drives bottom-line results dramatically higher.

I recently vacationed at a beach resort in Mexico. Before leaving, I was stressed, tired and a little bored. I didn’t really plan the trip beforehand, so I just hoped to have a clean place to sleep and relax for a whole week.

Once in Cancun, I rented a crappy car and stayed in a crappy hotel. The infra-structure in some places was almost non-existent and the food was often too spicy for my taste. Nevertheless, the car was drivable, the room was clean, the water was clear, the weather was sunny and the nights were warm and full of excitement. I enjoyed every minute of it. I would go back in a heartbeat and I definitely recommend the experience to anyone.

But it’s funny how some people tell me about their really bad experiences in Cancun, under exactly the same conditions. What was different? They had higher expectations! For me, what was just another colorful experience to add to my memoirs was, to those other travelers, a tortured experience to blot from their memory. Because they expected everything about the trip to be great, the actual experience could only disappoint.

Now imagine your boss assigns you an important task. The task is due in five days, but you know you can do it in two. If you just accept the deadline and surprise her by delivering it three days ahead of time, you are remarkable. On the other hand, if you promise to deliver in two days, you reset her expectations, and when you make the shorter deadline, you become just a reliable resource. Now, what would happen if you finished two days before the original due date, but one day after your promised date? That’s right—you fail to meet her expectations and may be deemed untrustworthy.

In short, to have more you should to expect less!

As crazy as it sounds, it is basically true. But let’s rephrase it for the business world: to amaze your customers, you need to set the right expectations. But what is the right expectation? Different people have different expectations in different situations. In some industries, demands and circumstances may lead you to set very high expectations as a baseline (e.g., Target’s motto:“Pay LESS, Expect MORE.”). Even worse, expectations frequently change over time and not everyone will expect the same things from you.

That’s the challenge companies are facing today: How to set the right Customer Expectations. Why are expectations important? Because:

1. You have to provide a great Customer Experience to maximize customer lifetime value, loyalty and retention.
2. A great Customer Experience is directly dependent on customers’ expectations.
3. Customers will take your company’s promises for granted and you never retain customers by meeting their minimum expectations.
4. To provide the best possible Customer Experience, you have to regularly exceed your customers’ expectations.
5. To exceed customer expectations, you need to set the right expectations for your product or service.
6. must promise less than your full capability, but more than the customers’ minimum expectations.
7. Your promises (and your capabilities) must be at least on par with the competition in order to acquire new customers.
8. It’s easier to know you own capabilities (and the competition’s for that matter) than to know your customers’ expectations.
9. What you do today will not be enough tomorrow. Expectations change over time and according to the situation.
10. You can’t afford to not meet your customers’ expectations
11. If you don’t run some risks, you become stale and predictable, and will eventually fail to meet your customers’ expectations.
12. You can please some people for some of the time, but you can’t please everyone all the time.

So how can you possibly create the right expectations? Here are some guidelines:

• Identify who is (or should be) your customer.
• Get to know your customer and understand their expectations.
• Don’t follow everyone’s expectation! If it’s not your target, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a distraction.
• Don’t play it safe. Maintaining the status quo is the quickest way to become ordinary and one step away from failing to meet ever-changing expectations.
• Define your own Customer Experience metrics and track them.
• Ask for feedback at every opportunity and make it a part of your continuous improvement process.
• Be careful with customer surveys. Most customers will lie to you (even if they don’t mean to).
• Put yourself in your customer’s place. View your product/service from his or her perspective and find what you can do to improve your customers’ experience.
• When you fail to meet an expectation, turn around and surprise your customers with something that will certainly exceed their expectations

In business, as in life, expectations define a good experience. If you exceed expectations often, people will love you. If you repeatedly fail to do so, they will hate you. Above all, if you are simply just meeting expectations consistently, people will be indifferent. When you never stand out, it is just a matter of time before a competitor acquires your customers.

Recently, American Airlines (AA) launched a website just for women travelers. It got dissed pretty quickly because of the initial lavender (non-AA branded) color scheme and lack of meaty content for real women travelers. I agree. There is the start of some good content, but there is still so much more they could include. I’d love to see some actual commentary from women travelers so you feel connected as a community. Research shows that female consumers are more likely to seek advice or information from others before a purchase, so this has huge potential!

But one issue still stands out above all. No one has mentioned that the site is just lacking some good, old-fashioned usability. There are 3 silos of information, but each time you want to navigate through the site, you must hit the back button to return to the microsite’s home page before you can move to another section—or even within that section. How frustrating! The site also resides within the already busy AA.com web interface so you could easily click out of the microsite without even knowing it. If they haven’t lost women with content, they’ll lose them in navigation.

I give American a lot of credit for being one of the first to truly tap this $4 trillion marketplace. Now, just remember to talk with us, not to us.

A recent article on the Financial Times website points out ways travel could be made easier by airlines and hotels, and makes this great point:

"Travel, particularly flying, could be much more pleasant if airlines, airport operators, and the services that support them actually employed people who have an intimate knowledge of how their passengers live, and who put themselves in such a mindset when making service decisions."

The author wonders why international airports don’t always carry international newspapers, and why a clean airplane isn’t always a guarantee. By giving the customer simple goods and services they would use and appreciate, businesses could produce happy customers and increased revenue.

a bunch of buffalo. The Beatles lyric is actually: "there lived a young man named Rocky Racooooooon." On our vacation out west last week, I never hesitated to start singing that song whenever anybody mentioned "Black Hills" or "Dakota," which made me really, really popular with my wife and kids. Oh well, they’re used to rolling their eyes when I’m around.

Our trip started with a jaunt to the Badlands (very cool) followed by Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. We camped in Custer State Park, which contained miles of rolling beautiful terrain, and enough buffalo (or do you say Bison?) to make your head spin. We were stopped several times in our car to let entire herds wander past.

Then we ventured on to Yellowstone in Wyoming. On the way we passed through Cody (named after Buffalo Bill) and ate at the famous Irma Hotel (founded by Buffalo Bill), drove past the Buffalo Bill Museum, gandered at the Buffalo Bill Dam, and cruised through the Buffalo Bill Cody State Park. That guy was the Trump of the 1890’s.

The kids were not particularly enthused about Old Faithful (which was right on time with its eruption) or the stinky pools of bubbling sulphur water. They enjoyed the hike to the base of a waterfall, and we saw a bear as we were leaving the park, which made the trip for my youngest.

Overall, a goll-dang fine trek.