How to Meet Customer Expectations

Zuzanna Bocian

9 min read

May 14, 2024

Customer expectations continue to rise, as 49% of consumers left brands that didn’t offer the experience they expected. (source) If you’re not hitting the wants and needs of your target audience, you’ll lose business over the long term. 

Today’s consumers have higher expectations and more options at their fingertips. If you can’t meet their expectations, they’ll go elsewhere. 

Focusing on customer satisfaction can lead to: 

• 80% increase in revenue.

• 60% higher profits. 

Marketing leaders must focus more on the customer journey and fully understand customer expectations.  

Understanding customer expectations 

Customer expectations evolve. Reliable analytics, surveys, customer feedback, and studies can help your company stay ahead of demands and needs.

A definition of customer expectations would be the actions and behaviors that the consumer expects from a company. 

You may meet customer expectations with: 

• Fast response times. 

• Personalized experience or touchpoints.

• Technological tools that allow for order tracking. 

• Multi-point connections across digital channels. 

If you’re an ecommerce brand, you may be required to provide solutions to problems proactively. For example, you may exceed customer expectations by monitoring their behavior on your site and identifying their next product purchase. 

Customers expect you to know their needs. Let’s say you sell beauty products, and your customer Sally has been looking at multiple acne creams. She still needs to make a purchase. You can start building loyalty and create a positive experience by: 

• Sending an email with a discount on your best acne cream.

• Displaying ads for the products that Sally clicked on. 

• Offering personalized interactions through your site. 

Small, integral changes can help your brand exceed customer expectations, but this is just the beginning of what you can offer your consumers. You also need to drill down the many types of customer expectations to know how to manage them better.

Types of customer expectations 

Satisfied customers are what every business strives for, but to create a strong brand reputation, you must develop strategies that: 

• Increase marketing communications. 

• Exceed interpersonal expectations.

• Lead to critical changes based on customer feedback. 

• Focus heavily on quality of service. 

Customer service expectations can only be met if you focus on these five types of customer expectations in your business: 

• Explicit: Your target audience has predefined customer expectations, such as a specific price range or products. For example, customers expect a fast food restaurant to have lower prices and certain types of food than a fine dining restaurant. These are explicit customer expectations. 

• Implicit: Customers anticipate or have implicit basic customer expectations. The customer may have expectations based on recommendations or similar experiences with a business in the same industry. 

• Digital: Digital expectations relate to your website, email, and social platform. For example, customers expect an order confirmation and shipping email if they buy products. Your customer base will also expect accurate answers from support on social platforms. 

• Dynamic: Meeting customer expectations over the long term requires agility and your business to evolve. You need to change with the times, such as offering live chat or a chatbot, to provide quality customer service and better meet customer service expectations. 

• Interpersonal: Your team members who have touchpoints with customers on the phone, via email, live chat, or other mediums must also meet customer needs and expectations.

You can manage customer expectations better now that you clearly understand what they are, but a customer’s experience can change from one business to another. Brand loyalty relies on identifying what your target market wants and needs from your company. 

Methods to identify customer expectations 

Understanding the types of customer expectations still leaves a gap in understanding what your new customers want from your brand. 

To manage and exceed customer expectations, you must identify what this means for your business. A data-driven approach will help you gain a competitive advantage and will include: 

Market research 

If you still need customer data, you can work to match customer expectations with research. You want to, at the very least, do what your competitors are doing. A few ways to do this are: 

• Analyze market trends to learn how businesses are exceeding customer expectations. 

• Enter the customer journey with a competitor and dissect the customer’s expectations first-hand (what did they do right and wrong?).

• Reach out to brands on multiple customer service channels and identify what brands are doing right and wrong.

Work with market research companies to learn what you can do to start exceeding customer expectations and offering excellent customer service. 

Customer feedback 

Established businesses can meet customer expectations and improve customer satisfaction by reviewing positive and negative feedback. You want to do a few things: 

• Read through negative reviews to learn where the service experience started to falter. 

• Read positive reviews to identify areas where you excel or customers feel you could improve. 

For example, you may sell shoes online, and 92% of customers are happy with the fit. Customers feel that you offer a great product, and while most are content with the experience, you notice that many buyers mention sizing issues. 

Now, you can foster loyal customers by offering in-depth sizing guides, free return policies, and a comparison to other brand sizes.

Data analytics 

Your internal data analytics can help you improve customer messaging and retention. Data analytics can help you: 

• Prioritize ticket management. 

• Resolve common issues faster.

• Reduce buyer friction or pain points. 

Analytics can come from multiple sources, such as third-party tools, website analytics, or error logs. You can: 

• Change the pages with high bounce rates to reduce buyer friction or better answer customer questions. 

• Find issues with your site through error logs that you can fix to improve the customer experience. 

• Streamline your customer service tickets based on priorities. 

If you gather enough customer data, you can piece together the actions necessary to meet customer expectations. 

Segmenting customer base 

Customer expectation levels vary between customer segments. You may find that Gen Z prefers self-service, but people 30+ expect personal experiences. Segmenting your customers and creating personas can help you offer your audience’s desired service.

Segmenting your customer base helps key stakeholders create examples of customer needs that can be used to better exceed customer expectations. 

Strategies to meet customer expectations 

Every brand has its own strategies for meeting the expectations of customers, but a few that work every time are: 

• Personalization: You already have customer data, which means you know your customers’ demographic and psychographic information. Customizing your interactions and offerings with them based on this information can help improve satisfaction across all touchpoints. 

• Quality and consistency: Every age group and customer persona wants the same thing: quality and consistency. Your brand should meet industry standards for these two areas and work on exceeding them. Customers want to know that they can rely on your products or services. 

• Customer service: Offer cutting-edge support with the help of AI, chatbots, live chat, phone, extensive knowledge bases, social media support, and in-depth employee training. Investing in customer service can lower response times and improve satisfaction. 

Big data can help you further meet customer expectations with real insights into customer needs and expectations.

Case studies 

Fortune 500 companies down to small mom-and-pop stores focus heavily on customers’ expectations. Real-world customer expectations examples from case studies include: 

Brastel 

Brastel used HelpDesk to streamline workflows and reduce ticket handling time. Customer service agents have been using multiple communication channels to help with managing customer expectations. 

Switching tabs and being “everywhere at once” led to slower response times. 

Using HelpDesk, the company set 20 workflows and began: 

• Implementing LiveChat. 

• Adding KnowledgeBase. 

• Reducing repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

Each ticket took 25 minutes to handle – far too long for a 20-person team. Revisiting the company’s workflows and leveraging the right technology led to: 

• 35% reduction in ticket resolution times.

• 2,000 tickets automated each month.

Leveraging technology 

Customers expect businesses to provide a personalized experience. Technology can help you reach this goal through AI-based platforms, CRM systems, live chat options, or internal workflow automation.

Businesses can enhance customer satisfaction with the help of cutting-edge tools. Brands should integrate the tools their customers need while training employees to better meet expectations. 

Employee training can go a long way in reducing customer friction, reducing support times, and keeping customers happier. Work with technology vendors who can recommend integrations that work naturally with your existing tech stack and won’t impede the customer buying experience. 

Feedback loop 

Customer expectations may change over time. It’s important to stay on top of these shifts so that you always know what customers expect and can make adjustments as they occur. 

One way to achieve this goal is to focus on customer communication and establish a feedback loop. Make it a point to implement a framework that allows you to gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback.  

There are several tools you can use to gather customer feedback: 

Surveys 

One way to gauge customers’ expectations and whether you’re meeting them is to send out customer satisfaction surveys. 

Ask buyers to rate their customer experience.

When creating your survey, prioritize open-ended questions. They allow customers to provide more detailed and specific information about the customer experience and whether you’re meeting or exceeding expectations.

Online reviews 

Along with surveys, make sure that you’re checking your online reviews regularly to determine whether you’re meeting customer expectations. 

Reviews give customers a voice and allow them to share their positive experiences or frustrations. Both are equally important and provide valuable insight into the customer experience. 

• Positive customer feedback helps you understand what you’re doing right and take steps to strengthen these areas even more. 

• Negative reviews help you pinpoint areas for improvement. For example, you need help meeting shipping expectations. If multiple customers are complaining about the issue, you can take steps to speed up order processing and meet those customers’ expectations. 

Reviews will play an essential role in your feedback loop, so ensure you encourage customers to leave them after making a purchase.

Social media 

Like reviews, social media allows customers to share their opinions about products, services, and brands. Their comments can help you understand what you’re doing right and wrong and how to improve. 

Incorporating social media listening tools into your tech stack will help you monitor customer sentiment and gather insights into how you can better meet expectations. 

Focus groups 

Customer focus groups are an opportunity to understand customer needs and expectations better. During these face-to-face meetings, you can ask customers open-ended questions and evaluate their satisfaction. 

You can use their feedback to improve your products, services, and other business areas. Surveys, online reviews, social media, and focus groups should all be a part of your feedback loop. 

Summary 

Meeting customer expectations can be challenging, but it’s a necessary part of business. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. They will turn to your competitors if you do not meet or exceed their expectations.

Use the strategies above to learn more about what your customers expect from you and how to leverage these insights to improve.

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