Their expectations versus your delivery
She's a brilliant website designer. Her end product is right up there with the best of the best. She can transform an unprofessional, unexciting site into a classy, inspiring site, dripping with ambience. She's also good with clients. She is professional and helpful.
Because her sites are so beautiful, and because she is so good on the phone, she is able to pick up clients easily. They have high expectations of her, simply because all the indicators point to a high satisfaction rate.
However, after working with this designer for a while, the client begins to realize that the designer has too many irons in the fire, and is simply too busy to find the time to complete his site so that it can be launched. He does everything he can to make it easy for the designer, but parts of the project that should be completed in days take weeks instead.
This scenario is quite common now. What's happening, in today's tight economy, is clients are still buying services, but they are buying from "the best of the best." These top-notch vendors have more business than they can handle. They don't want to say "no" to anyone coming in, because they know times are tight and they don’t want to reject any income.
They are also distracted, as we all are, with all things Internet - news that could have an effect on their business, wanted and unwanted emails, and technical tools that they must purchase, learn, and maintain. And, because their business is strong enough to support it, they are also looking for ways to grow their business, either by hiring people or using outside vendors. They must also attend to the accounting for their business and deal with regulatory issues.
All of these activities take time, time that is not spent doing client work.
Of course, in the client's mind, nothing is more important than his work. As work progresses more slowly than anticipated, disappointment sets in, until the disappointments outweigh the client's expectations, any recommendations he got from the other clients, and his desire to stick with the horse he's riding. He will start to look elsewhere.
That's how "expectations versus delivery" works in a service business. It can be summed up this way: When a client comes along in a tight economy, it's your client to lose. The client believes you will do as he expects, and, if you do, everything will be great. If you don’t, the relationship won't last.
On the product side, bean counters tend to drive product decisions in tough times, to the point where the resulting product barely resembles the expectations that are set by marketing.
Here's a good example: Oreo cookies.
The Oreo promise, made quite clearly on the box, is that each Oreo will be stuffed to the brim with the white filling. The marketing people at Oreo know perfectly well, judging by their packaging, that buyers of the cookies want them to have a generous filling. Even the word "OREO" looks like thick frosting. The illustration of the cookie definitely shows frosting that is at least as thick as one of the chocolate wafers, and filled all the way out to the edges. The message is, "There is a whole lotta frosting inside these cookies."
What they deliver is altogether different. The filling is about half as thick as one of the chocolate wafers, and is not "filled to the brim." They have broken the promise made on the packaging. The promise they are actually delivering is "There is hardly any frosting at all inside these cookies."
You can just imagine the meeting where the bean counter was telling the product people that they could save one-twentieth of a cent on each cookie if the frosting is a quarter inch in from the edge. You can imagine the product marketing and the marketing people protesting, to no avail. It's tough to talk about "the customers' experience," and "our brand promise," when the bean counter is proudly flourishing an Excel spreadsheet showing the CEO how much money they can save each year if they cut back on the frosting.
What does this have to do with you? A lot. Every email you get, every phone call that comes in, comes with a set of expectations. Most CEOs, in my experience, think they know what those expectations are, but interviews with customers always reveal a different set of expectations. Simplistically, the CEO may believe that the chocolate wafer is the most important aspect of his cookie. It's the part of the cookie that carries his logo, and it cannot be copied because he has a patent on the recipe. From the CEO's perspective, the wafer is where it's at.
The customer, on the other hand, doesn't care one whit about logos and patents. He buys the cookies to get the frosting inside the wafers. In his mind, the wafers are nothing more than carriers for the frosting!
Very, very few companies escape the temptations of wafer-centric thinking. What often happens is exactly what happened to the Oreo cookies. The marketing people know that frosting is important to the customer, which is why the packaging screams "frosting inside!" But they are unable to convince the bean counter and the CEO that when the desire is for more frosting, and more frosting is shown on the package, the company better deliver more frosting.
If the company continues to sell cookies with very little frosting, the company will, through its own actions, provide an opportunity for a competitor - in spite of patents and branding. Patents and branding only go so far; they cannot overcome the customer's actual experience.
Translating this to a technical product, if you have a patent on a technology, and your marketing boasts about that technology, the customer better experience a real benefit from that technology. Again, the customer's experience is the true driver of your success.
What if you were the marketing person sitting in the meeting where the CFO is starting to convince the CEO that no one will notice that the filling is reduced? How do you counter this train wreck in the making?
Well, for one thing, if you're sitting in the "let's use less frosting" meeting, the train has already left the station. The CEO will go for the idea, and soon the "less frosting savings" will start to show up on his bottom line. Once that happens, if you try to talk about branding and the customer's experience, the CEO will basically put his hands over his ears and say, "I can't HEAR you."
The time to stop the train wreck is long before this meeting takes place. You must assume that this meeting will take place sometime in the near future - it's practically guaranteed when times get tough - and you must be constantly presenting the customer's perspective to counterbalance the recommendations that the CFO will inevitably make.
I should say here that there are plenty of other ways to cut costs, and another part of your job, if you are the marketer or product manager, is to be able to suggest where money could be saved (packaging materials, for example) without disappointing customers and creating opportunities for competitors. This puts you on even par with the CFO, who is trying to cut costs (nothing wrong with that), but gives you an advantage - a way to cut costs without losing customers or market share.
One reality for your CEO: If your cookies are lacking frosting, people will stop buying them. Once they have stopped buying them, it will be almost impossible to get those customers back, because they will have found another favorite snack by the time your packaging announces that there is now "More frosting in every cookie!"
The most important tool in your arsenal, however, will be customer research results that state that customers consider the filling to be the most important part of the cookie, by a wide margin. That they do, in fact, buy the cookies so they can eat the frosting. You should also show how competitors tend to stress the frosting in their marketing and packaging, and show how they are actually delivering on this promise.
This way, when the CFO suggests cutting back on the frosting, your CEO will say, "Nice idea, but we all know that the frosting is the most important part of the cookie for the customer, and our competitors are not cutting back on theirs. Let's look for another way to cut costs."
Train wreck averted.
What is the "filling" in your product or service? Are you meeting expectations, or falling short? If you are falling short, how can you fix it? For example, going back to the website designer, she could re-allocate her time so that 45 minutes of every hour are spent on client work, and the remaining 15 minutes are devoted to other items. She will then be able to deliver the kind of service the client expected, and the client will be more than happy to stick around.
