Managing your Customer's Expectations

I received  an e-mail the other day that got me thinking about software development and in particular managing my customer's expectations during the software development cycle.

This e-mail from Mike had a couple of lines in particular that got my attention: 

When I was at a particular company, the whole company was founded around a single formula. That formula was:

Customer Satisfaction = Expectation -Experience 

These few words struck a chord with me and I started to think about how I manage my customer expectations. That same day, I was in a customer meeting giving a demo on some new features we were delivering for a custom portal solution in Dallas Texas. 

My partner said to me after the meeting that I had oversold the features and that he didn’t think that the customer was impressed with our delivery. I told him about my e-mail and we both laughed- after which he turned to me and said that he was going to start calling me “BIG E”.

The point is that managing a project and in particular managing customer expectations is just as important as the technical part of the job. In my case, I tend to oversell and sometimes under deliver, although I always put my best foot forward and my intentions are always packed with passion to deliver the best that I can.

The Dotnetnuke core team has done a good job of setting expectations and most customers are happy with their experience, so customer satisfaction is seemingly high.

In my opinion, the Dotnetnuke projects have done a poor job setting expectations, and I would speculate that many of us has had a bad experience with al least one of the projects- probably more than one, driving customer satisfaction lower than it could have been- had the expectations been managed well.

So as Entrepreneurs, Developers and Power Users we need to take some time to consider managing our customer’s expectations and continue to strive to improve the customer experience.

All levels of the Dotnetnuke stack, from the core team down to the consultant, including 3^rd party developers and design companies, need to manage customer expectations and deliver a customer experience to match that expectation, thus driving up overall customer satisfaction in the Dotnetnuke community.

I for one am changing my ways and will be using the above formula as a guiding light for my Dotnetnuke Business.

I think if we all do this, our community will continue to flourish, and we can continue to seek a revenue share from those efforts.

What do you think?

“BIG E”
Dallas Texas
Kendallsoft