Measuring & Modeling Customer Expectations

Was that what you were expecting?

How do you feel when you’re pleasantly surprised by the quality of a hotel room, the service at a restaurant, or the features in a new app?

And how do you feel when it takes 20 minutes to pay your bill online (after calling customer service) when you expected it to take a couple clicks? Or that cleaning product you purchased off TV that doesn’t actually clean your clothes as promised?

Customer expectations are closely linked to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Understanding customer expectations helps diagnose problems and leads to higher satisfaction, repeat customers, and customer referrals.

While expectations are important to measure, the best way to measure them is debatable. In fact, there’s even disagreement on how to model the role of customer expectations on satisfaction. Before we talk about measurement, here are three popular approaches for how to model customer expectations:

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