By Leigh-Ann Athanasius & Kathleen Kibi
In our previous post we talked about how weird expectations are and how they can often lead to disappointment. However, we continue to have them, especially in the workplace. This isn’t to say that expectations as a whole are negative, but when they are uncommunicated, they become more challenging.
Expectations in the workplace are usually either internal (your colleagues and supervisors) or external (your clients). In this post, we’ll cover client expectations and how we think you can manage and hopefully exceed them.
Client expectations can be tricky because you don’t want to disappoint them, but you also don’t want to spend your time overworking yourself to serve them; balance is key.
But how?
It is often said that to exceed your clients’ expectations, you need to anticipate their needs. While this is true, and there are several articles that cover this, we rarely think about the value of being consistent in delivering to our clients.
Have you ever missed a deadline? How did that go over with the client? If it was the first time, they probably let it slide because you usually do the work on time; plus, you apologised and promised it wouldn’t happen again. They knew that this was probably a one time thing.
But if you were missing deadlines often or the quality of your work was fluctuating? They likely wouldn’t be your client for much longer.
Keep in mind that impressing your clients doesn’t always mean that you need to do ten times more than your deliverables. This could lead an excessive strain on your resources while also increasing their expectations of you which you would constantly strive to exceed.
It creates a vicious cycle and that is not what you want. Clients want to work with businesses that provide quality consistently. It’s the little things – the ordinary actions – that makes up a client’s experience.
The foundation to exceeding your client’s expectations is understanding your client promise and the deliverables of your product/service. Once you understand these, you need to think through your strategy and focus primarily on how to ensure you meet them (your client promise and product/service deliverables) consistently.
This holds true regardless of your position or who your client is. Once you have that down, you can throw in a bonus every now and then that are unexpected surprises for your clients that keep them happy with your work.
We’d like to think we also do our best to meet and exceed our clients’ expectations. Check out this recruitment case study where we exceeded one of our client’s expectations. Situations like these are where consistency comes in; your ability to deliver consistently is how you create repeat clients that then become advocates for your skills or business.
Next post, we’ll talk about internal expectations at the workplace. Feel free to leave your thoughts, questions and general comments in the submission box below!
