Succeed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail.  Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me

This is one of my all time favorite universal lessons I have gleaned from business.  There isn’t really any part of my life that involves other people which doesn’t benefit from the practiced art of managing the expectations of those I’m interacting with.  When another human knows exactly what they can expect from you, on your terms, and when you consistently meet or beat that expectation on their terms, you have set the stage for a powerful ally in business; trust.

The reason this is so important is because people on a whole are very self-referential, which means they see their own perceptions and actions within the conversations and interactions they have with other people.   Imagine two people talking business over lunch.  The speaker could say ‘it will be a short project that we can deliver with limited resources and for a reasonable amount of money’.  The listener will build context around the statements with their own assumptions, drawn from their own experiences of what is short, limited and reasonable, that will ultimately create very different picture than the speaker meant to convey.  At that moment, an expectation was set in the mind of the client that may or may not be ironed out in the contract negotiations but will greatly influence the customers satisfaction when the project is completed.

I worked with a fantastic colleague on the team that had a very bad habit of responding to challenging technical requests with an automatic ‘Not sure yet, but that should be doable’.  What he meant to deliver was ‘It SHOULD be doable, but of course I won’t know until I work on it” and what the customer heard was “That WILL be EASY and there is no reason it won’t be done on time”.  So when said colleague moved heaven and earth to deliver on what turned out to be a very difficult task, the customer was unimpressed.  They had already expected it to be done without effort and was maybe a little disappointed that the colleague didn’t work on some of the other, less important features.  This is what I would call a ‘Technical win and an Expectation fail‘

Here are some tools and tricks I use when working with other people to help set the expectation

• Pictures and mockups.  When you are working in the web industry, their really isn’t an excuse to not mockup what you are seeing in your mind for the customer.  A tool I like to use is Balsamiq, which is a Flash based web mockup framework that is quick and easy to use
• Agile Development.  The agile process focuses on rapid delivery of code, typically every two weeks, that gives the customer something to wrap their head around.  I think Ill do a full post on agile tomorrow
• Closing summaries.  When I talk with customers, I have developed a technique of always closing out a conversation by saying ‘So, what I understand you want is…’ and just re-summing everything you’ve been talking about.  Etiquette might frown on dragging on a conversation past what the listener wants to endure, but I almost always find mismatching expectations in the closing summaries.

What do you do to manage someone’s expectations?

photo attributed to polandeze

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