Naomi Karten: Managing Expectations

Managing Expectations

It’s intriguing how often systems professionals and customers accuse each other of exactly the same faults: withholding information, not listening, making false assumptions, and failing to understand their perspective.

The Expectations Challenge

Expectations are influenced by so many factors, such as lifelong beliefs, past experience, common sense, wishful thinking, false assumptions, external pressures, the wisdom of those we trust, and the slickness of those who mislead us.

I have been struck by the extent to which many problems revolve around three issues: communication (how to communicate with customers to create appropriate expectations); information gathering (how to determine customers’ needs and evaluate solutions); and policies and practices (how to establish formal policies and sound practices to provide an infrastructure for managing expectations).

You can’t meet customers’ expectations if you don’t know what they want. Yet, finding out is rarely straightforward; you can’t just ask them and then assume they’ve told you what you need to know.

Involving Customers

A shared understanding is so central to the successful management of expectation.

I’ve seen exciting results in systems-sponsored discussions on expectations-related issues.

First, the extent to which service providers and their customers already share similar views; and second, the extent to which service providers misjudge what is important to their customers.

Formulating an Action Plan

Appointing someone to take primary responsibility for managing expectations. As an expectations manager:

Step 1. Think about your current service strategies.
Step 2. Perform an expectations analysis.

Taking the Challenge

The challenge is yours to make expectations something you and your customers think about, discuss, and work together to resolve.

Communication

The starting point for managing expectations is to become more conscientious about what you communicate and how.

Guard Against Conflicting Messages

Six ways in which you may be communicating conflicting messages to your customers, and ways to avoid doing so.

Conflict # 1: What You Promise vs. What You Do

Promising What You Can’t Deliver.
Delivering More Than You Promise. If you consistently complete projects for your customers before the date promised or deliver more than you promised, they will quite reasonably begin to expect results based on your performance history, not your promises.
Saying One Thing and Doing Something Else.

Conflict # 2: What You Say You Won’t Do vs. What You Do

Servicing Non-Supported Applications.
Servicing Non-Supported Products.

Conflict # 3: What You Imply vs. What You Do

Expecting a Follow-Up Response.
Expecting a Report of Results.

Conflict # 4 : What You Say vs . How You Say It

Speaking Face to Face.
Speaking of the Impossible.
Speaking on the Telephone. On the phone, the message conveyed by your tone of voice is likely to overpower the message communicated by your words.
Speaking with a Smile.

Conflict # 5: What You Write vs. What You Mean

Burying Policy. Important information can lose its prominence in written form if it gets buried in a document, as is often the case in policy manuals and service guides.
Burying Notices. It’s a common error to assume that, just because you’ve put something in writing, it has reached the intended party and will have the intended effect.
Setting critical information apart, highlighting it, or giving it an attention-getting look would help customers distinguish it from other information.

Conflict # 6: What You Say vs. What Else You Communicate

Mixing Risk with Benefit.
Circumventing the Conflict.

Conflicting messages serve as a reminder that everything you say and everything you do has the potential to influence perceptions and create expectations.

Continually ask yourself what expectations you may be creating that you’d prefer to avoid.

Use Jargon with Care

In the workplace, language that means different things to different people can cause more serious problems than just create the urge to slug; it can cause flawed outcomes, if not outright failures.

A common obstacle to communication on technical matters is the use of terminology that’s not understood by one of the parties.

Sometimes, technical terminology seems to be used with the deliberate intent to confuse customers.

Systems professionals love jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms and use them profusely.

Consider the following four causes of problematic communication.

Differing Definitions. A major cause of problematic communication is language which you and your customers both understand, but interpret differently. Often, it’s the most familiar terms that can create the greatest confusion. The discrepancy becomes your problem if customers expect you to diagnose and resolve it. Incorporate definition-checking into your project methodologies. Monitor your next several information-gathering sessions, and see if you can identify instances of terminology that could contribute to misunderstandings. Educate customers to be sensitive to differences in definitions. Ensure that in any endeavor involving multiple customer areas , adequate attention is given to issues of terminology that might have different meanings to different departments.
Ambiguous Statements. Words such as “quickly” are particularly prone to creating inappropriate expectations. Customers cannot be held responsible for failure to adhere to policies and standards they interpret differently from the way you intend. Ambiguous or unclear communication can also be the result of the absence of information rather than its presence.
Misguided Labels. A third problem in communication is caused by everyday language that offends. Even the most innocent language can trigger unintended consequences.
Code Words. Terminology intended strictly for private use can cause offense and damage customers’ perceptions of you if it reaches them. Beware of your own internal vocabulary.

The key to avoiding terminology-related misinterpretations of customers’ expectations is to have customers clarify what these terms mean to them. In addition to asking customers for definitions, ask them for examples of things you’ve done that illustrate their impressions.

Identify Communication Preferences

You can communicate goals, objectives, tasks, procedures, constraints, interdependencies, timetables, priorities, responsibilities, and accountabilities — and still not meet your customers’ expectations.

For some customers, how you communicate is more important than what you communicate.

A customer who wants a lot of information at one time may want very little at another. To complicate matters further, customers rarely tell you their communication preferences, making it your job to investigate.

Things that are both invisible and technical are, to those who don’t understand them, mysterious, elusive, threatening, and not to be trusted — and so, too, are the people who develop those invisible, technical things.

Manage customers’ expectations, you must do more than focus just on project deliverables, even when you’re on time, under budget, and all is well with the world. You must also consider how you work with customers.

Different people may have other preferences that can determine their receptiveness to the information you send them.

Be warned, however, not to become too accustomed to a communication style that works.

It is not unusual for service personnel to view their customers as if they are a single homogeneous group , with identical styles, attitudes , and modes of operation. The fact is, though, that customers are usually as different from each other as they are from the people who serve and support them.

Here’s a list of five steps you can take toward discerning and accommodating your customers’ preferences:

Be cognizant of your customers ’ communication styles.
Think about how you can modify your communication style to mesh with your customers’.
Spend time with your coworkers analyzing differences between your customer areas.
Don’t wait until customers complain to consider their preferences.
Remember that communication preferences may change over time and over the course of a project.

Few process issues are as crucial to whether customers perceive that you have met their expectations as buy-in: If they judge that their views have been taken into account, they are more likely to feel that you have met their expectations.

A Technique for Building Consensus. One such method for gaining consensus is the Delphi process, a technique that can be especially effective when a decision must be reached on an issue that involves numerous different viewpoints.

The process entails polling a group of individuals on an issue, having them privately prepare their responses, documenting the responses without listing names, and redistributing all of them to each individual. Participants are then polled again, and the process is repeated until the group has reached a strong consensus.

Public discussions become too political.

The very process of communicating about preferences is one of the most important techniques you can use to manage expectations.

Listen Persuasively

People’s perception that you are listening can lead them to feel comfortable with you and to open up to you.

When customers view you as interested in what they are saying, they feel more encouraged to respond to your questions, and to give you the information you need to fully understand their expectations.

You can be listening to your customers intently, but if it’s their impression that you’re not, then you’re not, in their eyes.

To improve the skill of appearing to listen, and to better appreciate the signs of both listening and not listening, observe others as they listen.

Eye Contact.
Responsive Behavior. People who study body language point out that leaning forward is a sign of listening and receptivity to the message.

Other indicators of listening include these :

Acknowledgment.
Questions.
Facial expression.
Note-taking .
Moderation.

Simply sitting quietly and listening can be one of the most effective ways to gather information.

Listening conscientiously and attentively is sometimes referred to as active listening, or listening for understanding. Hein van Steenis describes active listening as understanding what someone says “without being influenced by what you hear.”

When you jump to conclusions about either the person or what the person is saying, you are likely to then pay attention only to comments that support your conclusions and to ignore all others. This is selective listening, and it can pose problems when it’s important to learn as much as you can before drawing conclusions about customers’ needs.

In listening actively, be especially alert to statements of expectations.

If customers’ comments frequently suggest discrepancies between their expectations and your own, take note.

If it’s been your experience that your customers don’t listen, look within to see if you may be at least partly responsible, and talk to your customers to gain a better understanding of their perspective.

In speaking, sensitivity is important if your objective is to generate enthusiasm for your ideas.

With all communication techniques, be aware of possible national and cultural differences.

Information Gathering

You can’t meet customers’ expectations if you don’t know what they want. Yet, finding out is rarely straightforward; you can’t just ask and assume they’ve told you what you need to know.

Help Customers Describe Their Needs

Frustration concerning customers who don’t know what they want is widespread among those who serve and support customers.

Offering customers something that resembles what they want — a focal point — is a powerful way to help customers articulate their requirements.

Focal points help customers describe things because it’s easier to compare two objects than to describe an object from scratch.

Factor stress into your interpretation of customers’ descriptions.
Allow for the difficulty of describing things. A faulty description can lead to inappropriate action if the description is assumed to be accurate. A focal point can help those who lack the necessary visualization, description, or language skills.
Put the most likely option first. Whenever it’s feasible to present customers with a selection of choices, placing the most familiar or most desirable choice first may accelerate that process.
Offer categories of descriptions.
Provide a shared language.

The focal point you use depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, but almost anything that offers a concrete starting point can be helpful.

Prototypes as Focal Points.

Service Requests as Focal Points. The process of documenting and reviewing the request can lead to a closer approximation of what the customer wants.

Bargaining Chips as Focal Points.

No strategy is perfect, and in certain situations, focal points can backfire.

Descriptions can be detailed and accurate, but still ambiguous. Don’t let a description that sounds perfect keep you from ensuring that your understanding matches your customers’.

Although focal points provide an excellent place to start, you need to do some information gathering to refine your understanding.

Become an Information-Gathering Skeptic

An important step in becoming an information-gathering skeptic is to develop a questioning frame of mind.

Test such assumptions and develop a better understanding of customers’ needs? Consider the following suggestions:

Take nothing at face value. No matter what your customers tell you, don’t assume they said what they meant, or meant what they said.
Ask for clarification. If you’re a serious information-gathering skeptic, you miss no opportunity to ask customers to clarify what they mean.
Don’t be concerned about appearing unprepared.
Ask concrete questions.
Gather information from multiple sources. Feedback from multiple sources helps to fill in the gaps in what any given source tells you.
Consider the source.

Customers generally respond to information-gathering questions correctly and accurately, based on their own perspective .

Truth? For most customers, not telling the truth in response to your information-gathering questions is not the same as lying. It’s your job as an information-gathering skeptic to ferret out the truth, checking and double-checking that the questions they answer are the ones you asked.

Here are some techniques that can help you draw accurate responses from your customers.

Ask questions that focus on the process. In an information-gathering situation, it’s easy to inadvertently put people on the defensive, especially if you ask questions that seem to be about them, rather than their activities or problems.
Ask questions that focus on the person.
Ask consensus-building questions. Consensus-building questions are process-focused; that is, they concern the information-gathering process itself and ensure it is proceeding in a manner satisfactory to the customer.
Ask about the benefits of solutions the customer suggests.
Ask “why” questions carefully. Questions that ask why something is done a certain way might inadvertently trigger defensiveness, regardless of whether they are phrased as process-oriented or person-oriented questions.
Ask for more than yes or no.
Offer observations.
Play back statements to ensure you understood.
Invite customers to think of questions you haven’t asked.

Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg state, “If you can’t think of at least three things that might be wrong with your understanding of the problem, you don’t understand the problem.”

Understand Your Customers’ Context

To identify appropriate questions , start by devising categories of issues about which you might want additional information. One way to identify such categories is to use an attention-directing tool that Edward de Bono calls Consider All Factors.

You might determine, via a CAF or using any other means of devising categories, that four pertinent categories of questions are business, impact, timing, and risk factors. The idea, as de Bono noted, is not to generate a list of mutually exclusive categories, but to develop questions that help you stretch your thinking and expand your understanding.

As Gause and Weinberg note, “Without some common understanding of the problem, a solution will almost invariably be to the wrong problem.”

I’ve found that people working in groups develop more pertinent questions than they do working individually.

If you want to learn as much as possible about a customer’s problem, draw upon as many resources as you can, seeking the input of both those familiar and unfamiliar with the problem.

Learning about your customers’ context turns out to be relatively easy: Simply ask about their frustrations, concerns, and priorities. Ask what’s working and what’s not. Ask what’s making them happy and what’s driving them crazy.

A good first question can eliminate the need for any other.

What causes your priorities to change? As you listen to their responses, be sensitive to issues they describe that might make it hard for you to succeed in meeting their expectations, no matter what solution you devise.

What’s unique about this department?
What interactions do you have with other departments or with outside organizations?
What would you like to change in this department?
What would you like to keep the same in this department?
What kinds of situations make it difficult to meet your deadlines?
What departmental activities take too long?
What are the department’s criteria for success?

In addition to generating useful information , questions such as these help you strengthen your relationship with your customers.

Try the Solution on for Size

Specifications don’t necessarily mean a thing. They’re a good first approximation, based on everything customers know when they prepare them. They provide a focal point for saying “That’s not it,” but it’s impossible to really know how well the solution will work in meeting expectations until you try it out in real circumstances, or at least in circumstances as close to real as possible.

Unfortunately, until customers have had a chance to live with a solution, they have no way of being sure it will meet their needs.

What’s important is to do as much prototyping as possible early in the project, even if it revolves around only very scaled-down elements of the final solution.

It’s wise to demonstrate elements of a solution to customers as early in a project as you can.

Solution reviews can help identify the flaws and weaknesses in a proposed solution before you’ve invested too much effort in it.

However you conduct a solution review, what’s important is that it is not treated as a fault-finding session, but rather that it serve as an opportunity for all parties to share ideas and challenge each other to devise the best possible solution.

Edward de Bono — has an exercise called PMI, which stands for Plus Minus Interesting. In this exercise, a group of people first spend about a minute identifying the pluses about a given issue, then a minute identifying the minuses, and finally a minute identifying aspects that are neither plus nor minus, but simply interesting. This exercise has great value when conducted in groups of four to six individuals.

A solution analysis considers both the good and the not-so-good aspects of a proposed solution, but it does so by focusing on a specific set of questions designed to help evaluate a proposed solution.

Questions that focus on the positive ramifications concern the positive outcomes of a particular solution.
Questions that focus on the negative ramifications can help you identify factors that could prevent the success of a particular solution.
The preceding questions concern the impact of proceeding with a particular solution. A solution analysis should also consider the reverse side of the issue: What would be the impact of not implementing this solution — or any solution?
Before proceeding with a solution, particularly if it will require a substantial investment in money or resources, be sure to ask: How might this solution fail? You may find that you have one view and your customers have another .

Just as it’s important to identify your customers’ criteria for success, so that you know what will meet their expectations, it’s important to know how they view failure , so that you know what will fail to meet their expectations.

Asking how the solution might fail may lead to the decision to abandon it, but it may also raise issues that improve the odds of implementing a good solution.

The very process of identifying other possible solutions, or even just variations on the preferred solution, may reveal issues that you would have overlooked otherwise.

Post-project reviews are a means of asking what you’d do differently if you knew before what you know now.

Policies and Practices

Communication and information-gathering know-how will help you manage expectations on a case-by-case basis. However, on an organizational level, something more is needed: an infrastructure that facilitates managing expectations consistently and over the long term.

Clarify Customer Perceptions

Perception is reality. True or false?

It is easy for two observers to perceive the same thing differently.

Customers’ perceptions influence their expectations of you, and their expectations, in turn, influence how they interpret what they perceive. Most customers don’t understand the nature, scope, or complexity of your work. Before you know if you need to reorient customer perceptions, you have to know what those perceptions are.

Here are some questions to drive your discussion:

How do you think customers perceive your services?
What types of customer expectations do you experience that you would characterize as unreasonable?
What are the likely consequences of customer perceptions that are less favorable than you’d like them to be?
What do your responses lead you to conclude about customer perceptions?

It’s not unusual for discussions of customer perceptions to lead to improved strategies for managing expectations.

Identifying customer perceptions is an information-gathering task that can be carried out in several ways, including surveys, individual or group interviews, and meetings with groups of customers.

The customer survey is the most common method of soliciting feedback.

Specify exactly what issues require feedback.
Request specific examples that illustrate responses.
Provide plenty of space for written explanations.
Keep the survey as brief as possible.
Provide a due date.
Consider requesting signatures.
Announce your plans to conduct a survey.
Test the survey on a small group of customers.

An alternative to using surveys is to meet one-on-one with selected customers. At these interviews, ask customers to describe their experiences in working with your group.

Another approach to interviewing is to have customers conduct one-on-one interviews with members of their own business units.

Another way to learn about customer perceptions that generates considerable feedback, and invariably a few surprises, is to hold meetings with up to a dozen customers, and to discuss their perceptions as a unit.

It may not be easy to ask customers about their perceptions of you, but doing so doesn’t have to be a heart-stopping challenge. Once you’ve obtained their feedback, avoid the temptation to become defensive about perceptions you consider negative.

Presentations, meetings with customers, and newsletters all provide effective ways to communicate service information, but a service guide can provide the most comprehensive picture of your services. Effective service guides should contain a mission statement, ground rules for providing services, constraints in delivering them, methods for setting priorities, service request procedures, and itemization of customer responsibilities.

It’s also important to specify what services you don’t provide.

One additional category of information important in a service guide is a statement of the benefits of your services.

By documenting your ground rules, constraints, priority-setting methods, and customer responsibilities, you will be creating realistic expectations, not runaway demands.

Perception management involves more than just producing a service guide. When customers have not been told the reasoning behind decisions that have a direct impact on them, these decisions may appear arbitrary.

Be careful that you inform customers about planned changes far enough in advance.

One of the best ways to improve your customers’ perception of your services and to help them achieve more realistic expectations is to involve them in your efforts.

Using an absence of complaints as a measure of customer satisfaction can be risky. Worse, it can be a fatal mistake, especially if you offer services that are also available from competitors.

Checkpoint assessments provide a systematic opportunity, a few times a year, to determine whether you and your customers are still in sync.

Have your expectations of our services changed? Do our products and services still meet your needs? Are you satisfied with the way we are serving you? Has anything happened that we should know about?

Set Uncertainty-Managing Service Standards

Often, the hardest thing for customers to cope with is not knowing what to expect.

Recognizing how unsettling this type of uncertainty is for customers, and taking action to reduce it, are important elements of managing expectations.

That’s why the establishment of service standards that tell customers what they can expect will prevent or reduce customer anxiety.

Service standards can be useful for a variety of services, such as problem acknowledgment, problem diagnosis and resolution, status updates, recovery assistance, and product support.

Five categories of standard-setting:

No Standard-Setting
Internal Standard-Setting
Unilateral Standard-Setting
Standard-Setting with Feedback
Collaborative Standard-Setting

In the absence of formally communicated service standards, customers draw their own conclusions.

In determining which category will suit you, be aware that Category 5 is the most complex of the five, both to implement and manage.

Even though Categories 3 and 4 lack extensive customer involvement in the standard-setting process, a successfully implemented Category 3 or 4 approach will do far more to manage expectations than a Category 5 approach that fails.

Especially important in determining the most appropriate category is your own ability to adhere to the standards you set.

Instead of formulating service standards as guarantees, consider setting standards that span a range of responsiveness.

Customers are entitled to expect that you will respond within your stated service level unless you specifically inform them otherwise.

What is important is that customers are kept informed.

In formulating service standards, consider how they can be used not only to inform customers of what they can reasonably expect, but also to create incentives for customers to take certain actions.

It’s an excellent example of how to phrase a service standard that, in one brief statement, communicates information about:

the service to be delivered,
the level of service responsiveness to be provided,
the method of setting service priorities,
the conditions customers must follow to obtain high-priority attention,
the consequences for customers who choose not to follow these conditions.

Service standards provide a basis for communicating your service goals to customers. But nothing speaks on your behalf as well as evidence of past success.

What kind of service standard will help keep customers calm in uncertain conditions in which even you don’t know what to expect?

Identify those situations that create the greatest uncertainty for your customers and establish a service standard that will enable you to keep them informed about the status of the situation.

In working with customers, simply ask yourself regularly, Is there anyone I ought to update on the status of efforts that will affect them?

When Appropriate, Just Say Whoa

When customers ask for help, do you find it hard to say no, even when you can justifiably do so?

The art of saying no when you must and the science of establishing policies and practices to reduce the number of circumstances in which saying no is necessary.

If you want to provide consistently high-quality service, you can’t do everything for everyone.

Every time you provide nanosecond-level responsiveness, you lead customers to expect the same the next time around, whether or not they need this speed of response.

Sometimes, being just a little less available is the best way to reduce dependence on you and to promote customer self-sufficiency.

Even if you’re service-oriented, circumstances exist in which you might reject the request, redirect it, reassign it, reconsider it, defer it, or at least question its appropriateness.

For many people, doing what customers ask is simply the path of least resistance.

Saying no is not the only option you have in responding to customers to whom it would be best not to say yes. In some situations, it is both acceptable and appropriate to say whoa to customer requests. It isn’t saying no, but at the same time it isn’t quite saying yes.

The best way to begin doing more is by taking the Hit-by-a-Bus test.

Provide a single collection point for all service requests submitted to your department, so that you can identify similar or related requests.
Advise customers about their responsibilities in working with you.
Create a formal rejection process to make it easier to communicate your reasons for not accepting a particular request.
Educate customers to know the issues they should consider, alternatives they should evaluate, and information they should obtain before requesting your assistance, so that you can address their needs expediently.
Ensure that adequate communication exists in your department so that everyone knows what projects are in progress.
Clarify your priority-setting policy.

Service standards can also be established for classifying problems or requests according to urgency. For example, in an Urgent-High-Medium-Low classification, the Urgent designation might signify the need for immediate attention, High within four hours, Medium within a day, and so on — or whatever classification system best fits your services.

If you are frequently called upon for work that is more appropriately handled elsewhere, an awareness of alternative resources can help you say whoa. These alternative sources of support can be incorporated into your whoa-based service standard.

If your manager expects too much of you, your best strategy may be to confront the situation.

Although the risk of saying whoa is that it will trigger complaints about unresponsiveness, such complaints are not necessarily bad.

“If no one is complaining, it could mean we’re doing too much. I would prefer to back off a little at a time until customers complain. Then we can distinguish between just right and too much.”

The authority to accept a request or respond to a problem may need to be precisely defined so that staff members clearly understand both the scope and the limits of their authority.

Many service groups devote too much effort to activities that are either nonessential or that deliver too little payoff. In the process, they become diverted from responding to customer requests that are perfectly reasonable.

Ask customers to identify what services have lower priority.

It’s also a worthwhile exercise to measure your unproductive time. Establish a definition of unproductive time; then track the time your group spends on these unproductive efforts. An important way to reduce unproductive time is to eliminate redundant efforts. Analyze the sources and causes of this “repeat business,” and identify ways to eliminate it. Scripts you can use when it’s appropriate to say whoa.

“I’m right in the middle of something. Can I get back to you in an hour?”
“I can’t help you, but let me transfer you to someone who can.”
“I can help you faster if you’ll get me the following information.”
“Will it cause you a problem if we put this on hold until next week?”

Build Win-Win Relationships

Of all the ideas in this book, none, in my view, can contribute as powerfully to your ability to successfully manage expectations as building and maintaining relationships.

Relationship-building techniques range from those that are formal, scheduled, and carefully planned to those that are casual and ad hoc.

One of the simplest approaches to relationship building is to periodically hold a brief, informal meeting with each customer department.

How often you hold these meetings is not as important as that you hold them systematically.

A cross-functional exchange can be an excellent way to meet with representatives of several customer departments at one time.

This type of exchange can take numerous forms; one I particularly like is a meeting to exchange views on a preselected subject.

When you make a mistake that affects others, acknowledge it and do something to set it right.

The basic courtesies are things you already know: Advise customers of upcoming changes. Give them a chance to have their say — and when they do, listen. Return phone calls. Acknowledge the validity of their views even if you don’t agree. Send thank-you notes

Simply saying, “I don’t like it. Please stop!” is sometimes all it takes not only to stop the problem, but to dramatically improve the relationship.

Even something as positive as building and maintaining strong relationships carries potential pitfalls. One pitfall is that you’ll do too much for customers with whom you have strong relationships.

Closely related is the pitfall of friendly customers who choose not to complain even when complaints to management would give you the clout you need to request some changes.

Another potential pitfall is that you’ll do a less than adequate job of meeting the needs of customers with whom you have a strong relationship.

Formulate an Action Plan

It’s sensible to make sure that you understand what customers want, and that they understand what you can and cannot do for them. It even makes sense to say “I can’t help you now” (when appropriate, of course).

Develop an Action Plan

The importance of an expectations-managing action plan is not only what it can do to improve your service effectiveness , but also what it communicates to your customers — namely that:

You can’t do everything for everyone.
You are committed to serving customers in a way that comes as close as possible to meeting their needs.
Everyone benefits from working together to manage expectations.

After holding a planning session, have your notes transcribed immediately, and distribute them to participants.

Begin your planning session with a variation of the three context-setting steps outlined in the Introduction:

Step 1: Discuss your current service strategies.

Step 2: Perform an expectations analysis.

Step 3: Target one or two key problems for resolution.

In order to give these three steps adequate coverage, try to allocate at least a full day.

Review the Three Central Issues

The three key issues that provide a framework for managing expectations — communication, information gathering, and policies and practices.

Communication. Because no two people view the world in exactly the same way, the message a sender sends is not always the one the recipient receives.
Information gathering. You can’t meet customers’ expectations if you don’t know what they want or what’s important to them.
Policies and practices. No matter how effectively you believe you are serving and supporting your customers, you can’t gauge your effectiveness on your own. You must get your customers’ perspective.

Consider the two suggested action items listed after each guideline Note that the first action item challenges you to assess your current or recent performance; the second describes either a suggested change or an evaluation you can perform to identify appropriate changes.

Guideline # 1: Guard against conflicting messages.
Guideline # 2: Use jargon with care.
Guideline # 3: Identify communication preferences.
Guideline # 4: Listen persuasively.
Guideline # 5: Help customers describe their needs.
Guideline # 6: Become an information-gathering skeptic.
Guideline # 7: Understand your customers’ context.
Guideline # 8: Try the solution on for size.
Guideline # 9: Clarify customer perceptions.
Guideline # 10: Set uncertainty-managing service standards.
Guideline # 11: When appropriate, just say whoa.
Guideline # 12: Build win-win relationships.

Become an Expectations Manager

The role of expectations manager can be either a permanent or a rotating responsibility.

Serving as expectations manager is certainly not a full-time responsibility.

Help departmental teams consider their services from an expectations-managing perspective.

Work with teams charged with specific expectations-managing tasks.

Review past efforts from an expectations perspective

.Assess the success of expectations-managing efforts.

Monitor and report the status of formal expectations-managing efforts.

Facilitate meetings or other types of information-sharing among the expectations managers from multiple work groups.

As a minimum, start by saying “Let’s be sure we understand what we’re each going to do.”

Start Anywhere

Success in managing expectations is measured in small steps. Take steps to cause something to continue if you liked it, to prevent a recurrence if you didn’t — or, if you have no control over the matter, to be prepared for it the next time it (expectedly) happens.