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Your customers buy products like the ones you manufacture because they have a limited number of outcomes they must achieve. Furthermore, you and most of your competitors’ products are capable of delivering these outcomes at approximately the same cost. The big question then is “why do they choose one of the products over all others?”

To find out the answer, keep reading.

In spite of what we think, a brand is not something we can see, hear, or touch. A brand only exists in the mind of people who have expectations or experiences with a business and its products.

A brand is 1) emotional and 2) unique to each person. Brand equity is a concept that people use as a substitute for customer loyalty.

This definition raises two questions:

Here is a partial list of sources of expectations. You will note that you cannot influence all of these sources. However, you can preempt some of these influences through your website, in your advertisements, and while training your customer-facing employees and distributor partners.

There are six sources of customer expectations:

These things happen to everyone every day so don’t be shocked when a prospect or customer pulls one or more of these out of their bag of tricks and throws them down on the desk. The best you can do is tell your team to let you know every time they hear one of these and figure out where and how to address the subject first.

Experiences carry more weight than expectations because they actually happened to you or someone you trust. But not all experiences matter. What matters is only the experiences you or others remember. And people generally remember only two parts of the total experience: 1) the most memorable (either great or awful) and 2) the last thing that occurred during the total experience.

For example, one day your dishwasher stopped running mid-cycle. You call your service organization and expected the next-business-day service. Unfortunately, it took two days for the technician to arrive, but that was not critical since you remembered how to wash and dry plates by hand.

When the technician showed up, she was able to repair it in about one hour (which seemed a little long to you). But when she cleaned up, the area around the machine was spotless, and she presented you with the bill that included a 20% discount because she missed the 24-hour response promise.

The most memorable and last experiences were both highly positive so months later, you remember a positive experience. When it comes time to replace any appliance, you are most likely to go back to the dealer which serviced the dishwasher.

The secret sauce of great service experiences is a combination of the following:

And for everyone in the company:

Ensuring great customer experiences is everyone’s job. But the post-sales team has some unique responsibilities so make sure everyone else is supporting them.

Sam Klaidman is the founder and principal adviser at Middlesex Consulting. He helps his B2B product manufacturing clients grow their services revenue and profitability by applying the methodologies and techniques associated with Customer Value Creation and Customer Experience professions to assist his clients in designing and commercializing new services and the associated business transformations. Contact Sam here.

Image Credit: Darkdiamond67 / Shutterstock.com

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