14 Florida Pool Prosm • November 2023 By Michelle Moser, Sapphire Pools of Florida, Inc. / michele@sapphirepoolsflorida.com THE SCOOP ON SERVICE Managing customer's expectations Are we aware of what our customers expect from us? Managing their expectations may not be our first priority when we review a request for service and installation. Whether it be simple or complicated, we are thinking about product availability, fitting work neatly into already tight schedules, covering the increases that have applied to all products that we purchase, and how many men/women it will take to complete the job. However, considering the customer’s expectations at the start of a project could help to save on headaches and lost revenue at the end of a project. Most of us spend lots of time holding internal company meetings and talking about our expectations for the work we perform. Planning how we are going to perform the services. Setting expectations with our team relevant to our image and behavior for how we represent the company. We expect employees to show up each day and stay on task. We expect our teams to be efficient and reduce expenses so we have positive cash flow. How often do we talk about what the customer expects when we have these meetings? There are really three levels of customer service expectations: • Desired, which is what the customer hopes to obtain. • Sufficient, which is what the customer would find acceptable. • Unsatisfactory, where companies miss the mark entirely. Customers want us to understand their needs. They want us to provide multiple options for solutions. They want us to respond quickly. And they crave a personalized experience. In a perfect world we would provide all of the above in each interaction. Since it’s not a perfect world, we use strategies to manage customer expectations. Try being transparent and honest about the work that is proposed. Being transparent is important for being effective when working with customers because it builds credibility. How many times have customers been told one thing, and then after their project starts they are told something different? So many times in the past, I remember discussing problems about our customers or their pools, and one co-worker would say “What are we going to tell them?” and someone else would say, “Why don’t we tell them the truth.” We cannot go
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