Super fast responses and happy customers

01. Jul, 2010 0 Comments

I remember in uni, we had a topic about “expectations”. Firstly, through marketing communications, the marketer sets the expectation for the product or service.

If you deliver on the expectations, the customer is satisfied.

If you under deliver on expectations, the customer is dissatisfied.

If you over deliver on expectations, the customer is pleased, happy, sometimes even ecstatic.

So the point I’m getting at is that buyers have an in built set of expectations. This set comes from past experiences they’ve had with other companies. For example, as a buyer, an in built expectation I have when hiring an Indian programmer is that they will do the least possible work required to get their money. So if I find one that isn’t like that, I’ll be very happy.

Another example is, when you ring into a big company, you expect it to be a pain in the arse, that you’ll have to wait on hold, that you’ll have to navigate at least 3 menus. So when you have an experience where you speak to someone in 3 rings and they can help you, you get happy.

And so it is with email response times too. People have an expectation of receiving a response in a certain time frame.

My experience is, people don’t have high expectations on response times. If I had to guess, it would be that people expect a response in about 8 hours.

So you see where I’m going. All you have to do to give a customer a warm fuzzy, is to answer emails quickly.

Over the last month or so, at Photography Orders I’ve made an extra effort to answer all emails as soon as possible.

The effect has been quite interesting.

A majority of recipients have made a good comment about the quick response. It might be like “thanks for the quick response!”. (no worries)

But what was also cool was that those warm fuzzes directly translated over into product satisfaction.

When I answered someone quickly, they were more likely to send unsolicited good feedback about the product. And not just straight away, but over time as well. The product experience plays a bigger role in satisfaction than the actual product.

I should mention here that I haven’t done statistical testing on it, and that these are just my observations.

The main point I’m trying to make is this.

People have in built expectations
Exceeding expectations is the key to euphoric customers
Super fast responsiveness blows away these in built expectations and results in happier customers

Agree? Disagree? Am I stating the obvious? Let me know in the comments

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