Customer Expectations

12 Key excerpts on "Customer Expectations"

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  Customer Service in Tourism and Hospitality

  • Simon Hudson, Louise Hudson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Goodfellow Publishers

    (Publisher)

  It is therefore important that Customer Expectations are understood by those delivering customer service, and the opening spotlight provided an excellent example of a service provider – Joe Nevin in Aspen – totally in tune with Customer Expectations. Customers evalu-ate service quality by comparing what they expected with what they perceive they received from a particular service provider. If their expectations are met or 47 3 Understanding the Customer exceeded then customers will usually believe that they have received high qual-ity service and they are more likely to remain loyal to that supplier. Customer Expectations are likely to vary, even within the same sector. Travelers may expect a low level of service on an EasyJet short-haul flight across Europe, whereas they would expect much higher levels of service on a Singapore Airlines long-haul flight from Europe to the Far East. Expectations will also change over time; airline passengers have much lower expectations in terms of customer service than they did twenty years ago as flying has moved from being a luxury experience to more of a commodity. Expectations embrace several elements, and Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1993) suggest that customers have three levels of expected service; desired, adequate and predicted. A zone of tolerance falls between the desired and adequate service levels. All these service elements are depicted in the model shown in Figure 3.1. The desired service is a ‘wished for’ level of service, and is influenced by personal needs, explicit and implicit promises from the service provider, word-of-mouth comments, and the customer’s previous experiences. Adequate service is the minimum level of a service that a customer will accept without being dissatisfied, and is influenced by perceived service alternatives, the self-perceived service role, and situational factors.

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  Direct Marketing in Action

  Cutting-Edge Strategies for Finding and Keeping the Best Customers

  • Andrew R. Thomas, Dale M. Lewison, William J. Hauser, Linda M. Orr, Andrew R. Thomas, Dale M. Lewison, William J. Hauser, Linda M. Orr(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Com- panies that are successful with their fulfillment and service strategy understand that they first need to understand what drives customer satisfaction and then align company resources to produce the expected performance. Customer satisfaction is the extent to which a product’s or services’ perceived performance matches a buyer’s expectations. If product or service performance meets or exceeds a customer’s expectations, then the customer is satisfied to some degree. Some companies collect data on their customer satisfaction ratings from their customers so that they can monitor their performance and adapt direct marketing pro- grams to increase their customer satisfaction ratings. The key concept here is expectations. Do we receive the same level of service at a five- star restaurant as we receive at a fast-food restaurant? Do we even expect the same things? If you go into a fast-food restaurant, you do not expect someone to come by and clean up your mess. You expect to get up and take it to the garbage can yourself. In fact, if someone did come by and cleaned up after you, you would be shocked and amazed, in a good way. However, at the five-star restaurant, if none of your dishes were removed throughout the meal, you would be very upset at the end when you had a pyramid of appetizer, salad, entr ee, and des- sert plates stacked in the middle of the table. It is all about expectations. We have different expectations from every single business before we walk in the door. If our expectations are met, we’re satisfied, if our expectations are exceeded, we’re ec- static. The big hurdle that marketers usually do not recognize is that every time expectations are exceeded, the bar just got raised. Mean- ing, if you did go into a fast-food restaurant and someone was walk- ing around cleaning up after everyone, you may begin to assume that this particular franchise really cares about cleanliness.

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  The Reign of the Customer

  Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Satisfaction

  • Claes Fornell, Forrest V. Morgeson III, G. Tomas M. Hult, David VanAmburg(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  prior expectations were not met (“negative disconfirmation”), met (“confirmed”), or exceeded (“positive disconfirmation”). As such, in trying to satisfy consumers, companies must understand their customer’s expectations, manage them carefully, attempt to realize them as often as possible, and even exceed them when possible (and profitable).

  Recently, some marketers and companies have set the more ambitious goal that they must “always exceed customers’ expectations ,” or outperform expectations every time a consumer makes a purchase or experiences their services. As the quote above from Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson illustrates, even some large, well-respected business leaders and best-in-class service -providing companies pursue this objective. And to be sure, a customer’s expectations can be exceeded, at least at times. An excellent, motivated, and creative customer service representative, a new and novel product with innovative features, or an unexpected price discount or reward for enduring customer loyalty are all means by which a customer might receive more from a firm than originally anticipated. There are limitless stories of companies going above-and-beyond to delight their customers or resolve their problems that have “gone viral” and become exemplars of exceptional customer service. And to be sure, these types of extraordinary experiences will almost always have a positive effect on the consumer’s future behaviors in a way valuable to the firm, such as their likelihood to repurchase, up- and cross-selling opportunities, propensity to speak positively about the company

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  Customer Service in Tourism and Hospitality

  • Simon Hudson, Louise Hudson(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Goodfellow Publishers

    (Publisher)

  It is therefore important that Customer Expectations are understood by those delivering customer service, and the opening spotlight provided an excellent example of a service provider – Joe Nevin in Aspen – totally in tune with Customer Expectations. Customers evalu-ate service quality by comparing what they expected with what they perceive Customer Service for Hospitality and Tourism 46 they received from a particular service provider. If their expectations are met or exceeded then customers will usually believe that they have received high qual-ity service and they are more likely to remain loyal to that supplier. Customer Expectations are likely to vary, even within the same sector. Travelers may expect a low level of service on an EasyJet short-haul flight across Europe, whereas they would expect much higher levels of service on a Singapore Airlines long-haul flight from Europe to the Far East. Expectations will also change over time; airline passengers have much lower expectations in terms of customer service than they did twenty years ago as flying has moved from being a luxury experience to more of a commodity. Expectations embrace several elements, and Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1993) suggest that customers have three levels of expected service; desired, adequate and predicted. A zone of tolerance falls between the desired and adequate service levels. All these service elements are depicted in the model shown in Figure 3.1. The desired service is a ‘wished for’ level of service, and is influenced by personal needs, explicit and implicit promises from the service provider, word-of-mouth comments, and the customer’s previous experiences. Adequate service is the minimum level of a service that a customer will accept without being dissatisfied, and is influenced by perceived service alternatives, the self-perceived service role, and situational factors.

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  Marketing of Consumer Financial Products

  Insights From Service Marketing

  • Ritu Srivastava(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Business Expert Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3

  Managing Customer Expectations

  Chapter Overview

  Customer Expectations are the building blocks of customer satisfaction. Chapter 3 discusses the role of Customer Expectations and how they are formed in detail for financial products. It then talks about how financial companies can play a role in setting realistic Customer Expectations. The chapter concludes by discussing ways to manage Customer Expectations with reference to financial products in detail. The role of physical settings and ambience is also explained through the concept of servicescapes.

  Role of Customer Expectations in Marketing Financial Products

  To achieve customer satisfaction and delight companies today need to learn and manage Customer Expectations. In financial products since it is only the delivery that can be seen expectations related to that becomes important. Customer Expectations in relation to service delivery are views about service delivery that a customer believes he or she would get and is a measure of service’s performance (Zeithaml and Bitner 2000). Therefore, Customer Expectations act as reference points and with the help of these points, customer assesses the perceptions of performance regarding service. Knowledge about Customer Expectations is vital for a financial marketer.

  Two Levels of Customer Expectations and Zones of Tolerance

  Through their exploratory research, Zeithaml and Bitner (2000) have quoted that expectations vary from customers to customers regarding service, the same is true in case of financial products also. The first level is called the “Desired Level.” This is the service level, customer expects to get or wish, and believes that this can be achieved. The following example illustrates this.

  Naresh is a company executive in his 30s. He is married with two kids. His work profile is very demanding as it is a client service function and he always seems to be pressed for time. He plans to buy an insurance policy but is not able to take out time for completing the procedures. He is looking for an insurance agent who could assist him in this and take care of all the formalities. Naresh is also ready to pay a price for this service. Through this example it becomes clear that even in a product like insurance there is a need for servicing where the client is ready to pay fees. However, there happened to be a conflict in Naresh’s wished for or desired level of expectation with reference to this expectation. The agents available in the market had been asking 15x the fees he was ready to pay as the right price; he was ready to go up to 2x. Thus “x” was the desired or wished-for level of fees, whereas adequate level of fees was “2x.”

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  Customer Service in Business: Keeping your customers close and loyal

  • Jonah C. Pardillo(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The team should share their experience with a customer of a different background. The entire team can learn lessons from subtle misunderstandings or even communication failure. The team should provide feedback and suggestions on dealing with tricky situations. This gives an opportunity for the team to interact, resolve issues and improve their own communication skills with the customers. Sharing experiences and knowledge allows people to understand people from other cultures and develop new approaches to serve them better and satisfy them. They develop the ability to address the diverse needs of the customers and effectively communicating with people belonging to different cultures. Globalization and Changing Customer Expectations 43 2.6. CHANGING CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS Consumer expectations refer to the actions or attitude of the company towards them when they interact with each other. In the previous times, customers were primarily concerned only about the basics like fair pricing and quality of the products or services. However, the modern empowered customer is well connected and more aware and has much higher expectations. These include proactive services, connected experience and personalized interactions. This era is often referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. It is characterized by exponential technological change. Products and services which were cutting edge just a couple of years back has become outdated today. Hence, the customer experience has emerged as a major differentiator which offers the business a competitive edge. In order to succeed, organizations not only have to offer the best products and services but also demonstrate that customer’s interest is their priority. Customers have a lot of expectations from the organizations and but do not have faith in them. Almost 50 percent of the customers believe that the companies fail to deliver what they expect.

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  Designing Service Excellence

  People and Technology

  • Brian Hunt, Toni Ivergard(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Frontline employees also need to be skilled in incorporating these observations into the ongoing creative processes of service delivery. By its very nature service delivery relies on people and their personalities. As an interlocutor in the service process the customer plays a key role in helping construct and shape the service. The customer is an inescapable actor in service delivery and makes inputs to its quality. As any service provider instinctively knows, customers vary. Temperament, age, gender, and nation-ality are some key differentiating factors. Context is important. Sensitive pro-viders of service look for contextual clues to help them deliver appropriate 48 Designing Service Excellence service that satisfies Customer Expectations. One of the stated dimensions of Customer Expectations of service is responsiveness (i.e., responses appropri-ate to the context). 2 Other dimensions of Customer Expectations are tangibles, reliability, assurance, and empathy. 3 Some customers can be impatient, hurried, and edgy (what French hoteliers refer to as pressé et stressé ). Others may be relaxed and easygoing. Customer Expectations may differ. Culture plays a part. People from different cultures seem to have differing concepts of quality and different tolerances of what is acceptable. Some nationalities seem culturally programmed to expect excel-lence (and to complain vociferously when it is lacking). Others grouse about quality, but under their breath or among their peers. Yet others accept lower levels of quality, perhaps for reasons of personal temperament or because it is culturally inappropriate (bad manners) to criticize and make a scene and com-plain. For evidence, one only need watch television news footage of passen-gers in lengthy queues for their airline flights to hear the differing responses. Customers’ perceptions and expectations of service quality differ over time. In general, first-time customers differ from repeat-purchase customers.

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  Creating Customer Loyalty

  Build Lasting Loyalty Using Customer Experience Management

  • Chris Daffy(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  These may sound like silly or extreme examples, but they are actually quite common. If you don’t believe me, just make a few telephone response calls in response to today’s newspaper advertisements and experience this for yourself. Having done that, you may then decide to investigate this in your own organization. This is actually worth doing on a regular basis. Hopefully you will find that you are performing consistently better.

  The point is that unfulfilled expectations or broken promises always lead to disappointment, dissatisfaction, irritation and stress. These are all feelings proven to damage customer loyalty, so the impact of this on revenue and profit can be dramatic. You therefore need to be sure this is not happening anywhere, at any time or in any situation in your team or organization.

  Levels and types of expectation

  There are, of course, different levels and types of expectation with different consequences that are likely to result from them being exceeded, met or unfulfilled. There could be many, but I think the following are the main categories to consider.

  Conditional expectations

  These are the expectations customers have, without which they will not become or will cease to be your customer. You could call them the ‘table stakes’ or the ‘must haves’. They are a condition of the customer using your organization, your product or your service. They rarely build loyalty if you deliver them, because they are a core requirement, but you will lose the sale and maybe the customer if you don’t.

  Examples of these could be:

  • Providing what the customer views as good value for money . This is, of course, a subjective judgement. What one person considers to be good value, another may not. But so long as the vast majority of your target customers view what you provide as being good value, you’re probably OK.
  • Having the features within your product or service that most customers want

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  Service Management and Marketing

  Managing the Service Profit Logic

  • Christian Gronroos(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In Advances in Services Marketing and Management, Vol. 4. Greenwich, CT: The JAI Press, copyright c  1995, p. 153 with permission from Elsevier. 116 SERVICE AND RELATIONSHIP QUALITY THE DYNAMICS OF EXPECTATIONS The Liljander–Strandvik model of relationship quality implies that a range of comparison standards can be used by customers to compare their experiences of quality attributes. As has been noted earlier, it may often be best to use no comparison standard at all, but simply to measure customers’ experiences of various quality attributes. However, customers’ expectations do theoretically form an important factor influencing perceived service quality both on an episode (service encounter) level and on a relationship level. Regardless of whether expectations are measured or not, in order to understand how quality is perceived in an ongoing relationship, one has to understand how expectations develop throughout the relationship. This is important for several reasons. First, customers’ expectations should be managed, so that they do not expect the impossible. Second, it is critical to understand that customers may not expect the same aspects of quality at a later stage in the relationship as they do in the beginning, and why this change has taken place. Third, one has to know the inherent mechanisms of the dynamics of expectations to be able to manage expectations. Jukka Ojasalo 30 studied the way the quality of professional service develops in a customer relation- ship over time. Although this study was carried out in the professional service area, the dynamics of expectations revealed in the study seem to be valid for any types of service in customer relationships. Figure 4.8 illustrates the expectations model. In the long term, three different types of expectations can be identified: fuzzy, explicit and implicit expectations.

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  Handbook of Marketing

  • Barton A Weitz, Robin Wensley, Barton A Weitz, Robin Wensley(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  A fourth factor is service Perceived Service Expected Service CUSTOMER COMPANY Customer Gap GAP 1 GAP 2 GAP 3 GAP 4 Service Delivery Customer-driven Service Designs and Standards Company Perceptions of Consumer Expectations External Communications to Customers Figure 14.1 Gaps Model of Service Quality UNDERSTANDING AND IMPROVING SERVICE QUALITY 347 recovery – understanding why people complain, what they expect when they complain, and how to develop effective strategies for dealing with inevitable service failures (Tax & Brown, 1998). Provider Gap 2: Not Having the Right Service Quality Designs and Standards A recurring theme in service companies is the diffi-culty experienced in translating customers’ expec-tations into service-quality specifications. These problems are reflected in Provider Gap 2, the dif-ference between company understanding of Customer Expectations and the development of customer-driven service designs and standards. Customer-driven standards differ from the conven-tional performance standards that most service companies establish, in that they are based on pivotal customer requirements that are visible to and measured by customers (Zeithaml & Bitner, 2000). They are operations standards set to correspond to Customer Expectations and priorities rather than to company concerns such as productivity or effi-ciency. Standards signal to contact personnel what management priorities are and which types of per-formance really count. When service standards are absent or when the standards in place do not reflect customers’ expectations, quality of service as per-ceived by customers is likely to suffer (Levitt, 1976). Because services are intangible, they are difficult to describe and communicate: a particular problem when new services are being developed.

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  Insights to Performance Excellence 2021-2022

  Using the Baldrige Framework and Other Integrated Management Systems

  • Mark L. Blazey, Paul L. Grizzell(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • ASQ Quality Press

    (Publisher)

  This is especially dangerous in a difficult economic climate where competitors are going to extraordinary lengths to attract a larger share of a smaller group of customers willing to purchase. 3.1b(2) Product Offerings – The failure to anticipate key customer requirements (including products and product features) and changing expectations and their relative importance to customers' purchasing or relationship decisions across the customer life cycle causes the organization to lose agility, which is usually not a serious problem if all other providers are similarly stagnant. However, if some competitors accurately and systematically anticipate emerging customer requirements, then they are more likely to win the battle for the customer. IF YOU DON’T DO WHAT THE CRITERIA REQUIRE . . . Continued Insights to Performance Excellence 2021–2022 142 3.1 Customer Expectations— SAMPLE EFFECTIVE PRACTICES a. Customer Listening • Closely monitor technological, competitive, societal, environmental, economic, and demo- graphic factors that may bear on customer requirements, expectations, preferences, or alternatives. • Conduct focus groups with leading-edge or demanding customers, not just cream puff cus- tomers. This is where the most valuable, honest feedback will probably originate. • Train front-line (customer-facing) employees in customer listening and use these employees to collect feedback. • Identify and analyze critical incidents in product or support performance or quality to understand key problems from the point of view of cus- tomers and front-line employees. • Systematically interview lost customers to determine why they left. • Conduct win/ loss analysis relative to competitors. • Analyze major factors affecting key customers. • Use tools such as forced- or paired-choice analy- sis (where customers select between options A and B, A and C, B and C, and so on).

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  21st Century Airlines

  • Nawal K. Taneja(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Understanding Customer Expectations and behaviors is hardly a new concept, given the insights it provides for developing and delivering innovative products and services. What is new, however, is the need to understand the speed and the areas in which customer behaviors and expectations are changing. Also, industry professionals need to keep up with new ways of engaging and interacting with customers in order to understand and respond to these changes. Not that long ago, many airlines thought that they knew what consumers wanted, and, based on that belief, they communicated their perceptions of value propositions to consumers in the traditional marketing seller-to-buyer direction, and with in fl uence exerted by the seller through mass marketing. Now, with the proliferation of new technologies and social networks, busi-nesses must have two-way communications with segmented sets of consumers through their networks to learn about consumer values and to communicate their values to consumers. The focus of communication is now not just infor-mation on the features of a product, but also the experiential aspects, as these also in fl uence behavior. From that context, airlines are beginning to have some control of consumer behavior through the provision of experience. In the long term, this will be helpful, since customers behave, to some extent, in response to their experience. If a consumer is frustrated with an airline, she will look for services offered by another airline, assuming she perceives differences among airlines. As such, leading airlines see that experience is becoming not only more important, but also necessary in engaging and interacting with consumers to receive input on the delivery of experience as perceived by the airline and as received by the passenger. As a result, airlines are transforming their business models.

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