The #1 Key To Customer Satisfaction

Small business owners ask me to help them all the time.

And BY FAR the request I get most often is to help them get more new customers.

But every business owner also knows that keeping current customers is also a top priority, and that the key to keeping current customers is to keep them satisfied.

So what is the #1 Key to keeping your customers satisfied?

It’s to effectively manage their expectations.

That’s the basis of the well-accepted business principle that you should always seek to “under-promise and over-deliver.”

Almost all entrepreneurs, business owners and sales professionals know this principle, and yet many give in to the pressure to do the exact opposite – to over-promise and under-deliver. At best, this leads to the short-term gain of bringing them a new customer, and at worst it is a recipe for disaster, because it results in the loss of customers, a lack of referrals and an overall negative view of the company in the marketplace.

Allow me to illustrate this point with two very different experiences I had last week. In both cases, I was provided less-than-expected service. However, my overall satisfaction was completely different in the two situations…

My beautiful wife Michele and I were headed to Newport Beach, California on a combined business and leisure trip. We would enjoy some fun in the sun, hanging out with friends, and I would attend a two-day marketing conference to re-connect with top marketers like Jay Abraham, Joe Sugarman, Brendon Burchard, Kevin Harrington, Daymond John and others, and to make some new connections as well.

We had been planning the trip for months, and were extremely excited as we packed our bags and went to bed the night before the trip.

And then our travel adventure began.

As we finished packing our bags and got ready for our cab to arrive, I turned on my cell phone and saw that I had received a notification from United Airlines:

“Your 810am flight to Orange County is delayed. UA1452 now departs Chicago 830am and arrives 1026am”

“No big deal,” I told Michele. “We’ll just hang out in the airport for an extra 20 minutes before we leave.”

Ahh… If only that were the case…

After we completed the totally undignified process of getting through the security checkpoint and waited at the gate for a little over an hour, we were finally instructed to board the plane.

The flight crew barked out orders as they hurried people to stow their bags and get seated, even going so far as to threaten one passenger with having his or her bag removed from the plane and left in Chicago, because it appeared not to fit into the overhead compartment and its owner failed to identify him or herself. Then a passenger (the bag’s owner?) saved the day by turning the bag around and getting it to fit into the storage compartment. Ridiculous crisis averted.

Once we were all dutifully seated and buckled up, a flight attendant made some kind of confusing announcement, blaming the 20-minute delay on something to do with United being unable to locate our plane in New York, and how Newark Airport was closed at that early hour, so they had to go to LaGuardia, or some such confusing and basically meaningless excuse.

But once that strange announcement was complete, the attendant informed us that the flight would be delayed again, this time blaming it on another confusing cause having something to do with the scheduled pilot having reached his flying limit, or something like that.

As we were attempting to decipher this cryptic announcement, United sent me another notification on my cell phone:

“Your 810am flight to Orange County is delayed due to crew availability. UA1452 now departs Chicago 926am and arrives 1132am”

The passengers were starting to get fairly agitated, so the attendants kept making announcements with convoluted explanations about how United was trying to find a pilot for us, along with assurances that they were doing their best and we would likely be departing “shortly.”

(*I clearly remember that vague, almost-meaningless term, because they were very careful to continually repeat it as their prediction of when all problems would be solved: “shortly.”)

And then, another notification hit my cell phone (and many of the other passengers’ phones as well, judging from the collective groans of disapproval and heightened agitation and frustration throughout the plane):

“Your 810 flight to Orange County is delayed due to awaiting aircraft. UA1452 now departs Chicago 945am and arrives 1151am”

Again, the attendants took to the intercom to offer more explanations/excuses, along with the same familiar assurance that we would be taking off “shortly.”

And then, sure enough: another notification on my cell phone:

“Your 810am flight to Orange County is delayed due to awaiting aircraft. UA1452 now departs Chicago 1030am and arrives 1236pm”

A few minutes after that, we were informed that a flight crew had been located, and would be joining us — you guessed it — “shortly.”

Our flight departed at 10:52am – more than two-and-a-half-hours after the originally-scheduled departure time.

Michele and I were discussing our possible change in plans for the day, thankful that we had planned a couple of extra free days and didn’t have anything scheduled until dinner with friends. All we would miss would be a few hours out by the pool – sorely needed now to recover from being cramped up in an airplane for almost seven hours.

In a feeble attempt to appease the passengers, a flight attendant announced that United would graciously allow everyone to watch DirecTV for free during the flight, saving us all the $7.99 charge. As you can guess, that announcement was met with more than one disgruntled response, such as “so they think they can make us happy by giving us something that costs them nothing and would only cost us ten bucks?”

Of course, United isn’t nearly as horrible an airline as Spirit Air, as loyal readers of this blog may recall I detailed in my post, “Spirit Airlines: The. Worst. Airline. Ever.” But in this particular instance, they came pretty darn close to that level of overall ineptitude and disregard for their passengers.

Here’s the bottom-line…

The passengers of United Flight #1452 were frustrated and angry, mainly because of the airline’s failure to effectively manage expectations. Their choice to continually over-promise (“we should be leaving shortly”) and under-deliver (actual departure was later than even their fourth and final promised time).

So how could they have handled this unfortunate situation a lot better?

How about this example that Michele and I experienced shortly (no pun intended) after that one…

When we finally arrived at our destination, the 4-star Hyatt Regency Newport Beach, we were greeted by an upbeat, outgoing, friendly front desk clerk. She gave us a choice: We could either check in immediately to a room with a less-than-desirable view, or we could wait “up to an hour or an hour-and-a-half” for a room with a balcony overlooking the golf course and bay. Her explanation was that she couldn’t get a hold of someone in the Housekeeping department to let her know whether that room was ready or not.

My beautiful wife Michele opted to wait, and we figured we needed to grab some lunch anyway, so the extra wait wouldn’t be too bad to bear.

And then it happened.

No sooner had we sat down and ordered our lunch, than my cell phone rang. It was the front desk clerk, letting us know that our room-with-a-view was ready for us to check into – after only 10 minutes, when we had been warned that it could have taken up to 90! Needless to say, we were very happy to hear that news, and were thrilled with the excellent treatment we had received. (*NOTE: As a bonus, our waiter at the Hyatt restaurant noticed our worn-out appearance and cut our bill in half as a gesture to make our day a little bit brighter.)

Okay. So let’s examine the polar opposite ways these companies and their employees chose to deal with the delayed delivery of their services…

The United flight attendants and cell phone notification senders may have anticipated that their flight would be delayed for two-and-a-half-hours, yet they decided to continually over-promise that all of the various and ever-changing problems would be solved “shortly.” Result: Passengers got increasingly irate with every further excuse and delay.

Hyatt’s front desk clerk may have anticipated that our room-with-a-view was ready for us to check into, yet she chose to err on the side of caution and present us with a worst-case scenario of a 90-minute wait. Result: We were very pleasantly surprised with the excellent treatment we received.

To summarize…

United and its representatives chose to over-promise and under-deliver, while Hyatt and its representatives did the complete opposite: under-promising and over-delivering.

United continually told us to expect a short delay, so the longer delay (and almost-insulting $7.99 comped service to appease us) meant major disappointment.

Hyatt cautioned us to expect a long delay, so the short delay (and bonus half-price lunch) meant extreme satisfaction.

Charles Swindoll said, “Life is 10% what happens, and 90% how you react to it.”

The same is true when it comes to the satisfaction of your customers, clients or patients: Problems are bound to occur, but it is completely up to you how you manage people’s expectations to result in them feeling that you either under- or over-delivered.