Expectations

Clearly setting expectations up front and being as transparent as possible is key to a strong relationship with your customers and others interacting with your brand, product or service. Too often companies do not inform enough or communicate through the wrong channel and the user becomes frustrated. There are different ways and times to communicate with your audience and doing this correctly will do wonders for your users’ satisfaction and will keep your customer support team untied from avoidable support cases.

For example, today I was on the phone with my health insurance provider trying to find out when they would respond to an application I sent in over 10 business days earlier. I had been waiting and waiting for a response and it got to the point where I wanted to know if they were ever going to get back to me. After speaking with a customer service agent she informed me that responses typically take 14 business days. Great, now I know. If they had told me when I first submitted my application I wouldn’t have called and I wouldn’t have spent the past week thinking to myself about how unorganized and slow my insurance carrier is. That’s a lot of negativity they could have avoided by just giving me a heads up back in the beginning.

What spurred this post was from hearing about a service at Atlanta’s international airport called Track-a-Line where you can sign up for email alerts about wait times at different security check points around the airport. This is a fantastic example of setting expectations and being upfront about possibly bad news. The psychology of queuing is a fascinating topic and something that almost every company deals with. Do it poorly and your customers will hate you for it.

Email marketing, online ordering & shipping, download times and so many other things online make sure to set your expectations. But be sure to also remember those other areas like, what your return policy is, what features are included in the product or how long it will be until you get a response.

Then there is a balance between what information you push out to your audience and what information you supply upon their request. If I fill out a help request form I want to know right away what the response time is going to be, that’s information you want to be sure and push out to your audience via a confirmation page or email. Technical details that I may or may not need to ever know, that is information you want to provide but doesn’t need to be front-and-center, so create a FAQ area or self-service support section on your website. The examples I just mentioned are obvious and not all that difficult to do properly, I’m sure 99% of companies are doing a good job of this. But it’s the smaller details unique to each company that really make the difference. Figure out what these are and outline how you can make improvements.

And if you’re looking for examples of what the geniuses in queuing psychology are doing visit Disneyland.