Disconnects between differing expectations have been the basis for conflict for as long as humans have been around. Gaps in expectations between husbands and wives, children and parents, employers and employees, and customers and providers, will all lead to deteriorating relationships in one way or another; and when looking through the eyes of "customer service", obviously the customer/provider disconnect is a key concept for professionals in the industry to understand.
Quite often this topic is overly simplified into idioms like "build it and they will come", or "give the masses what they want", providing false comfort that all you need to do is simply ask customers what they want, build it, and then give it to them; soon you'll end up in service heaven. The truth is that there are many types of expectation, each playing a different role in determining whether your customers love your brand.
The podcast reference in this blog link is an interview between BTalk and Nick Coster from Australia's Brainmates, a product management agency that consults on everything from pre/post go to market strategies; including product planning, marketing, and support.
Nick Coster refers to a methodology that has its roots from the mid 80's called SERVQUAL, a 10 point concept developed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry, who established quantitative measures for benchmarking and evaluating the effectiveness of customer service strategies, and who also contributed to defining the "zone of tolerance", which was described as "the difference between desired service and the level of service considered adequate".
SERVQUAL was clunky and complicated, and later simplified into the RATER model, which focused on five key disconnects: those between a customer’s expectations and perception, between what customers expect and what managers think they expect, between management perception and the actual specification of the customer experience, between experience specification and the actual delivery of the experience, between the delivery of the customer experience and what is communicated to customers.
There were plenty of detractors for SERVQUAL, and I certainly don't endorse anyone adopting the methodology without thought, but I find it an excellent basis to begin the journey of making customer satisfaction an intrinsic business concept. Those who are looking for somewhere to start can do no wrong in using the five gap areas as a basis for opening discussions with their customers, and formulating key actions to improve how they deliver their services.
I find a good (and novel) place to start is the gap between what the customer expects and what is communicated. The unspoken word can be such a powerful influencer, and preconceived ideas based on previous experience such a difficult concept to change, that becoming explicit in plain language about what you're going to do, how, why, and when, can immediately set a level playing ground between customers and providers.
A majority of customer complaints come from having paid money for an expected level of service, mostly because the provider wasn't upfront to begin with. This does mean having a good strong look at your competitive model, but that's part and parcel of being in the red ocean.
I also love the fact that these gaps have zero to do with your frontline -- it focuses on the gaps that are caused by management and the decision makers of the provider, and it's at that level of the organization where those disconnects need to be identified and closed.
There are case studies on the Internet that you can take a look at which will help you formulate your questionnaires and research for determining your scores using the SERVQUAL methods. Reading the case studies is good, but my opinion is that the scores really do not matter, and I certainly wouldn't encourage using them to determine whether you're doing better by looking for higher scores. At the end of the day, these are statistics, and we all know how these can be misinterpreted. I am a strong advocate of the belief that you'll know you are doing better if your customers start telling you so.
Instead, use the model to help define where you'll begin your journey, and then map out your path picking whichever gap areas you think are the most important. Talk to customers directly, and then investigate their concerns against your internal procedures, policies, capabilities and infrastructure, even your marketing, and match the concerns/problems against the gap categories. Whichever category has the most grievances would be where I would devote my time and resources.
One by one, day by day, you'll improve in your key areas -- those that have the biggest impact to your customers. Stick to your roadmap, and avoid shifting direction purely based on the prevailing winds.
Pretty soon you'll start to feel the impact through a decrease in customer compliments, getting more new customers, lower churn, reduced employee attrition, and best of all higher sales.
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