Exceeding Expectations
A lot of companies go to work each day with a motto about exceeding customer expectations. Sounds familiar, right? Somehow, doing ‘more’ than your customers expect seems like a great mantra.
But there’s something important in there that sometimes gets lost in the execution. To exceed your customers’ expectations, you’ll need to know what their expectations are in the first place.
Have you ever completed a job, only to find out that what the customer expected and what you ‘did’ weren’t quite the same?
The Cost:
Doing something that doesn’t match the customer’s expected ‘scope of work’, is an error that creates a “disconnect” between expectations and reality. And this disconnect always costs you money.
If you’re lucky, you’ll have done more than the customer expected, and they’ll be pleased. But the error may have cost you unplanned labor, material, or resources to execute the ‘extra’. Your increased output might even mean that you’re losing money by doing this work.
And if your work comes up short, you can suddenly find yourself scrambling to satisfy a set of customer requirements that you weren’t aware of. Your only other option is a dissatisfied client who didn’t get what they thought they paid for.
To Be Avoided… When Possible
Even if it’s a rare occurrence, being disconnected from your customers’ expectations is something to avoid. But customers come with all kinds of issues, and there’s no way to avoid every potential source of trouble.
There’s probably no fail-safe way to avoid every potential problem with customer interaction, but we think you can prevent most of your customer expectation problems by communicating clearly with your clients and documenting your scope of work, especially in the pre-sales stage.
What steps are you taking to understand and measure against your customers’ expectations?
One Tool That Can Help
Go iLawn and Go iPave offer you great tools for documenting the scope of each job as part of your proposal process.
A proposal that includes a detailed site map offers an instructive tool for engaging with your clients. They not only hear what you say, but the SEE what you’re proposing in your image of their jobsite.
A detailed spreadsheet of property measurements also helps quantify and document the work and shows the client how you arrived at your bid.
By providing this level of detail, you’ll prevent the commonest source of disconnect by ensuring that the customer really does understand what you’re proposing. And if the worst happens and a client decides to take you to court, it documents the pre-sales conversation in a way that protects you during litigation.
So use Go iLawn for your landscaping bids or Go iPave for your asphalt maintenance proposals. If you and your client start out on the same page, you reduce your risks.
Because nobody wants to face unexpected customer requirements or deal with a client who didn’t get what they thought they paid for.
~ Go Get Em’
The Go iLawn/Go iPave team.
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