People Decide How They Feel About Your Business Before They Ever Become Your Customer
One of the hardest things about running a business is realizing that customers can expect something from you that you never actually promised. We’ve seen this happen when someone is disappointed with a perfectly good experience. Nothing necessarily went wrong. The service was delivered exactly as intended, the company did what it said it would do, and somehow the customer still walks away feeling like they expected more. That can be frustrating from the business side because the immediate reaction is usually, “But we never said we did that.” You probably didn’t. The customer still expected it.
That expectation had to come from somewhere, and this is where we think the conversation gets more interesting. People don’t arrive at a business with an empty head waiting for the company to tell them what to think. They bring assumptions with them; some come from the price. Others come from what they’ve experienced with similar businesses. A recommendation from someone they trust can set an expectation before they’ve even looked you up.
This is why two people can have the exact same experience with a company and leave feeling completely different about it. One person got exactly what they expected, while the other thought the experience would be something else entirely. We saw this conversation play out recently with restaurants. People will spend hundreds of dollars on dinner and walk away disappointed even when the food was good. When you listen to what they’re actually complaining about, sometimes the food was never really the problem. For that price, they expected the service to feel different. They expected the atmosphere to feel different. Maybe they expected the entire night to feel more special than it did. The restaurant sold dinner; the customer thought they were buying an experience. Neither side necessarily communicated that out loud.
We think businesses run into the same problem when they focus heavily on what they’re selling without thinking about what people believe they’re buying. Those two things can sound almost identical until they aren’t. If you position something as premium, people are going to attach their own definition of premium to it. That definition may include things you never put in a service description. They may expect faster communication, a smoother process, or different details because that’s what premium means to them. You can argue that those things weren’t included, and technically you may be right, but that doesn’t change how they feel about the experience. That’s why we think expectations are interesting. Businesses create some of them intentionally and inherit others without realizing it.
Your industry creates expectations for your and your competitors do too. If every company someone has worked with in your industry follows a certain process, they may assume you do the same until you tell them otherwise. Even your price puts an idea in someone’s head about what should happen next. This doesn’t mean a business has to accommodate every assumption a customer makes. Some expectations are unrealistic, and there will always be someone who wants something you never offered. We don’t think the answer is promising more just to make sure nobody is ever disappointed. We do think businesses should know what people are likely expecting from them.
That requires thinking beyond whether the service description is technically accurate. If someone saw your business for the first time today, what would they assume working with you is like? Does your pricing reinforce that expectation? Does your process? More importantly, when they finally become a customer, does the experience they receive make sense compared with the one they imagined? Because sometimes the biggest gap in a customer experience isn’t between what a business promised but what it delivered. It’s the gap between what the business thought it was promising and what the customer thought it was promising. And that relationship starts before anyone buys anything.
