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Thus, we want to make things clear and help you understand how to measure customer expectations and how to fulfill them in the way that will be beneficial for both your business and your clients.
We are going to answer some vital questions: What is customer expectations definition? What are the best ways to collect data about customer expectations? What types of customer expectations exist? How do customer expectations affect demand? What are customer expectations examples?
And most importantly, we are going to discuss the impact customer expectations have on your business and how you can turn this impact into profit.
What are customer expectations?
Customer expectations point out to customer wishes about the way you service them, therefore including such aspects of customer-brand relationships, as customer service, sales process, customer support, personalization, and many others.
To put it simply, customer expectations are about how customers want you to treat them. In fact, this means that customer expectations are very individual for different customers, so the only way to measure customer expectations as a big picture is to categorize and classify them by using their similarities and differences.
Another vital factor is that customer expectations rarely remain stable, they change depending on the customer experiences received by the customer throughout his life. To simplify it, we can assume that most customers expect your business to provide service of highest quality that will meet generally accepted standards, thus failing to meet their customer expectations may result in increased customer churn.
In other words, there is too much competition in most industries today, especially when it comes to SMBs (small and midsize businesses). This makes you stay focused on the quality of service you provide to your customers as even one bad experience can convince them in a need to seek another partner - not you, with all the negative consequences for your business.
Top 5 reasons why customer expectations matter
They ensure customer retention
Let’s agree that the only thing that makes customers keep buying from you is your ability to meet clients needs and expectations. This statement has been proven by numerous studies: in different countries, the number of customers who are going to switch to your competitor after a single negative experience varies from 60% to 80% - the highest rates are in Brazil, France, and Spain - countries that are highly developed markets with tough competition and presence of world’s best brands.
Thus, meeting customer expectations is the only way to achieve the customer retention scores you are looking for.
They build customer loyalty
Customer loyalty isn’t the same thing as customer retention - your customers can keep buying your goods and services, but they can be neither loyal nor engaged. Customer loyalty becomes at the moment when customers are ready to promote your business and advertise it in front of their friends and family. Being a brand advocate isn’t similar to being permanent customer, but a brand advocate is a man who can bring you new buyers and strengthen your brand image and reputation.
The more accurately you measure customer expectations and meet them - or even exceed where possible - the more likely your clients are to become loyal customers.
They improve customer satisfaction
Meeting customer expectation in service means also improved customer satisfaction. How does it work? Well, first of all, customer satisfaction is measured for each customer interaction, and your only way to meet consumer expectations is to make that one customer interaction feel and work perfectly according to how customers imagine it. Thus, each time you meet customer expectations of service, you provide high customer satisfaction score interaction.
The more times you meet expectations of customers, the higher their customer satisfaction level is.
They improve brand reputation
There is one popular question many entrepreneurs ask newbies in business: What differs their business from competitors? Well, it won’t be a lie if we say that meeting customer expectations is the best way to put your business ahead of competition, as there are too many examples of bad service and poor customer experiences.
Imagine how strong would work the word of mouth marketing when you gain the reputation of a business that meets customer expectations.
They grow your revenue
Do you know what important revenue metric is closely related to customer retention and customer loyalty? It’s the customer lifetime value (CLV), the metric that allows you to measure exactly how much money will each customer bring to your business throughout their customer journey. Thus, as meeting customer expectations is the best way to improve customer retention, you also improve customer lifetime value which has direct impact on your business and your profitability.
What are the types of customer expectations?
There are commonly 5 types of customer expectations you have to keep in mind. This classification is required as different customer expectations are measured differently and has to be treated differently.
- Explicit customer expectations. These are absolutely specific customers’ expectations, such as the availability of a certain product within a certain price range. They can also refer to such vital characteristics of your goods and services, as color of goods, features, etc.
- Implicit customer expectations. These customer expectations are about customer imagination of what it looks like to do business with you based on their previous experiences, which means this type of customer expectations is less specific and highly individualized.
- Interpersonal customer expectations. This type of customer expectations is about what kind of experience customers assume from your team members, both through digital channels and in in-person interactions.
- Digital customer expectations. Despite its name, this type of customer expectations isn’t only about customer interactions handled through different channels. These customer expectations are also about simplicity and usability of your website, social media accounts, quality of customer experience regarding the use of your digital resources, such as customer service channels and self-service options.
- Dynamic customer expectations. These customer expectations are about development of your product or service, the way they are improving during customer journey and they way you invest in these changes.
Each type of customer expectations have different influence on overall customer experience, so segmenting them is vital to get a deeper understanding of how you can enhance customer experience and meet these customer expectations effectively.
What are the trend customer expectations?
Let’s make things clear - there are customer expectations that are unique for each certain company and each certain industry, and we will never be able to list all of them, as they aren’t stable either - they keep changing. Nonetheless, there are also universal customer expectations that are also current trends in the world, regardless of the industry you are working in or specifics of your business - those are the customer expectations we are going to discuss below.
Quality of customer service
- Almost 3 out of 5 customers report that positive quality of customer service and positive experience is an irreplaceable factor for them if brand wants them to become loyal customers.
- 65% of clients said they would have left the brand after even a single negative experience.
- After more than one negative experience, 80% of customers would mind do business with a competitor.
That’s how customer service influences your customer retention - you just don’t have a right to make a mistake, even if it is a single case. Customers expect you to provide customer service of a high quality, but what is its definition? How to define customer expectations in this case, where the term of “good customer service” is too broad to be standardized?
First of all, good customer service is about resolving customer issues within one interaction - ⅓ of all clients said so. On the other hand, 69% of users reported the speed of customer service as the most important factor in defining it as customer service of high quality.
Hyken provides the following list of three main aspects of excellent customer service to get a satisfied customer: to be treated like a valuable client, high qualifications and expertise of customer service representatives, and speed of service.
Personalized experiences
- 63% of B2C buyers expect business to understand their individual needs and expectations, while almost 75% of B2B buyers think the same when it comes to defining quality customer service.
- 79% of customers are ready to share their personal data in order to receive tailored customer experiences and personalized customer service on a regular basis.
- 70% of customers report agent awareness is a must-have for any business to provide customer service of acceptable quality.
As you can see, personalized customer service isn’t something optional, it is the thing customers clearly ask you to do - they are even ready to share their personal data in exchange for being serviced with their personal needs taken into consideration.
Customer service personalization is, first and foremost, about recognizing customer and his needs and wishes. This isn’t an example of perfect customer service when you can name your customers by name, but that’s the first step - after that, you can form personalized offers by taking into account customer preferences, previous purchases, data from customer feedback or social media, and so on.
Thus, customer service personalization means not only more positive customer experiences, but also more revenue for your company and more sales opportunities generated without acquiring new customers.
Omnichannel support
- 75% of users would like to receive consistent customer experience, no matter what communication channels they use to contact a company.
- 64% of buyers want to do business with companies that can meet their needs in real-time mode.
- 74% of customers use different contact channels to complete customer interactions or even a few channels per interaction
Omnichannel support obviously means an option for customers to use different channels for completing customer interactions, and also to switch between these channels without losing the progress of communication. The main communication channels include web chat, phone calls, emails, social media channels, chatbots and messengers - all other channels are automated, so we consider them self-service channels.
Omnichannel support is extremely important if you want to provide a seamless customer experience to all of your clients, and to meet their customer expectations too - in 2024, especially younger audience require you to provide an option to communication at least through one of text digital channels.
Self-service opportunities
- 35% of clients think that self-service options are essential to be available.
- 65% of users prefer using self-service portals for resolving common problems.
- 79% of clients expect businesses to provide multiple self-service options
Self-service is vital for customers, because since the wide spread of digital communication channels, there has been a growing trend for younger users to avoid contacting customer service teams for resolving common questions or issues. Let’s agree on obvious thing - many people just love resolving issues on their own, and leaving them without such an opportunity doesn’t only ruin their customer expectations, but just has no sense at all - you can’t change someone’s personality.
Self-service channels include such ones as IVR system, chatbots, self-service portals, knowledge bases, FAQs, and so on. You don’t have to adopt all of these channels, but your goal is to find out which self-service options will be preferred by your target audience.
How to measure customer expectations?
Research your customers
The only way to learn more about your customers is to research them - and this relates not only to consumer expectations. You have to track customer behavior, customer sentiment, customer preferences, and feedback to identify what are the main needs of your target audience and how you can fulfill these needs in the most effective way.
The more data you collect about your clients, the higher is the chance that you will be able to provide personalized offers and tailored experiences because even such things as history of communication with the customer support team or previous purchases can give you a lot of information about customer expectations - what products you can offer next, where are the possibilities for up-sales, how can you improve customer service, and so on.
Focus on proactivity
Proactive service is the way of resolving customer issues and answering their questions before these issues are noticed and identified by customers themselves. Thus, proactive service requires you to track numerous data flows simultaneously and build a system where you will have stable access to deep insights into business processes and operations because the goal is to find the problem before your customers do it - and that’s quite tricky.
Again, the only way to be successful in providing proactive service is to collect customer data, because only data-driven approaches can guarantee that you will be able to identify issues timely.
Collect customer feedback
You know what is the easiest way to find out what the customer expectations of your clients are? Ask them directly. Collecting customer feedback isn’t only about asking whether they liked or not each interaction - it is also about an opportunity to start deep and detailed conversation with the customer about brand-customer relationships. Positive reviews, as well as negative reviews, are also a source of knowledge for your potential customers, so you should better care about customer trust and respond to the results of customer surveys.
Thus, you can just add a question to your survey: “What could we do better to make this interaction more comfortable for you?” - and they will answer. Yes, you can face low engagement rates to such surveys at the start - a few people believe their feedback will make you do anything. But when you build working relationships and communication with customers and implement their wishes to meet consumer expectations, they will share their thoughts in a more open way, which will open new opportunities for you in the field of improving customer service experiences and meeting customer service expectations.
What are the best channels to notice customer expectations?
To find out more about what do customers want and what are the exact clients expectations, you can use the four following channels:
- Surveys - as we have already mentioned, the best way to define customer expectations is to ask customers what they expect from you directly.
- Internal customer data - such data, as purchase history, customer support history, demographic information, and so on can give you enough information to provide personalized approach to every customer.
- Marketing research - you can use focus groups or wider market research technologies to identify industry trends and tendencies in the case of customer expectations.
- Social media - customers are more likely to share their opinions in an open manner in social media than during direct formal communication with you, so try to seek for customer opinions in the social networks at least to compare it with what they keep saying you in private conversations.
Now you know how to measure an expectation of customer through a preferred channel, but you do need an omnichannel contact center solution to collect customer feedback and measure customer expectations and to handle customer queries.
