Good service is incredibly easy. Tell someone you are going to do X. Then…do it! Great service isn’t much harder. Tell someone you are going to do X. Then…do X+1.
One of the greatest examples of this was delivered during the Sydney Olympics. It shows what can be achieved through careful expectation management. The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta were generally hailed as a transportation nightmare. During the lead up to the Sydney Olympics, we were constantly warned about transport delays. The organisers even issued revised timetables for the Olympics period.
I stayed in Coogee during the Olympics. Our timetable told us to expect a three-hour journey from Coogee to Homebush. The first event started at 10:30 a.m. so we caught the bus at 7:30 a.m. We arrived at Homebush and were seated by 9:30 a.m. We said what a wonderful transportation system Sydney had delivered. We were one hour early! We all thought the transport was brilliant. I obviously had too much time on my hands waiting for the races to start, and I started thinking about it a bit more.
A normal trip from Coogee to Homebush takes 40 minutes. We had taken three times longer, but we congratulated the organisers on the fantastic transportation system. What was brilliant was not so much the actual transport but the management of expectations. Think of the equation P/E=S. The performance divided by our expectation equals satisfaction.
In business terms, make sure you under-promise and over-deliver—provided you make the initial promise realistic. Promising to return a phone call in six months and then ringing back in one hour doesn’t really cut it. Lastly, to really deliver that +1, try going above and beyond. Make a phone call a week after the sale to see if the client is happy. Not only will he or she be impressed with the follow-up, but it is also more likely to leave your customer with a positive image.
The plus sign can then turn into a multiplier for your success.