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June 6, 2021 by Steven Cohen Leave a Comment

Exceeding the Customers Expectations….The First Time Around

What does a customer really expect? What would cause a customer to say they were extraordinarily satisfied? These are the questions that should be discussed during the sales process and appropriately addressed with the customer. Time to share….What we will do to exceed your expectations.

customer expectations

Getting the customer involved; asking the customer to set the standard gives the customer a feeling of control and involvement in the project outcome. How do they know if the job was done? What should they look out for? These are questions that help to clarify the overall expectations. The goal is two-fold, one being customer satisfaction through communication and the other to ensure that the people doing the work are clear about what the customer expects.

Have you ever thought the job was completed to get a one-page punch list when you were expecting your final check?

Define the standard you expect to deliver. Teach it to your employees. Explain it to your customers. Make the standard explicit and tangible. Something that both employee and customer can touch and feel. Create a checklist that points toward a job fully completed. Use industry standards if they’re available. Provide a warranty if you think you can afford to, to reassure customers of your company’s intent. Make people in the field responsible for delivering on any re-dos, reporting on why the re-dos were necessary and explaining how they won’t let it happen again.

Invest in training your employees. Don’t assume your field staff knows how to handle customers. Do role-playing to practice walking through a job. Start out with a simple example and a cooperative customer. As the practice sessions unfold, make the examples more complicated and the customers more difficult to understand.

Starting work with a plan will also help to ensure the job gets done on time and in budget — everyone’s goal. Have the people who will be doing the work meet before setting out, to review the plan and ask questions. Make sure they know how to submit a change order request if the customer asks for additional work to be done. With approved changed orders your company is likely to be paid for add-ons, rather than told to eat the cost because only the original budget was OK’d by the client.

Reserve a portion of the money you planned for the job’s cost to go toward a bonus if the customer is satisfied. Get everyone working on the job invested in its success. Pay for performance once the job is done right.

Always measure results and post them where everyone can see. If you have multiple teams, track results by team. Ask customers to rate their satisfaction with the work. Show using visual tools how many jobs/teams were rated as satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Ask the leading teams to coach the rest of the group.

How do you control and motivate for quality service delivery? What are your thoughts? Like what you read, please follow me, I enjoy sharing my thoughts through blogging.

Looking for a good book on the subject, suggested reading;

  • The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It Paperback – by Michael E. Gerber

Filed Under: Sales & Marketing, Suggested Reading Tagged With: Business Sales, Customer Expectation, Customer Satisfaction, Marketing

About Steven Cohen

Steven Cohen realized his passion at an early age. Starting his first entrepreneurial endeavor in high school, a landscape business, he developed into a regional player shortly after graduating college. Since selling that first business, Steven has held key leadership positions with several large landscape companies on the Eastern Seaboard in the capacity of Director of Operations, VP-Landscape, VP-Operations and most recently as Chief Operating Officer.

In 2006, he began consulting. With thirty years in the landscape-snow industry, Steven shares his passion, purpose and pride in an industry he loves with the formation of GreenMark Consulting Group. Steven prides himself as being both an analytical and a conceptual thinker who effectively partners with business owners to assess opportunities, facilitate strategic decisions, and drive successful implementations.

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