inluminent

I’ve been researching some material for a segment of a class I’m giving tomorrow at work. The audience is a great audience, and I’m aiming at having an interactive talking session. I’m speaking to 25 or so employees that are primarily print advertising sales people about managing their customer’s expectations about online advertising.

I’ve found a few good pieces for inspiration (thanks of course to Google):

Articles on Managing Customer Expectations, though it really deals with ‘customer service’ examples.

Something I’ll be doing in this class is offering a “When I’m a Customer, I Want …” brainstorming session, just to get people talking.

I also found this quote:

“Expectations are your client’s vision of a future state or action, usually unstated but which is critical to your success.”

From this page as well as these three steps to managing expectations:

1. Setting expectations

2. Capturing/monitoring expectations

3. Influencing expectations

Here’s another good article I found that says:

“When a customer makes a choice between two or more suppliers of a good or service, that choice is often made on the basis of what they expect in the way of product quality or how they expect to be treated.”

The Project Management Review has an article titled Five Steps to Effectively Managing Customer Expectations which are (in brief):

Step 1: Prepare the team and the executives.

Step 2: Define quality metrics.

Step 3: Kick off.

Step 4: Communicate progress.

Step 5: Review performance.

Lastly, I found this PDF from which I’ll pull some great talking points:

“According to Deloitte and Touche, it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.”

“In the credit card industry for instance, a company must mail 30,000 to 50,000 applications in order to achieve a two or three percent response.”

“A satisfied customer will recommend it to at least four other people, while an unhappy customer will tell seven other people about the product or service.”

While none of these apply directly to advertising sales, I’ll use them as talking points in my segment, just to get the discussion going, and then I’ll speak about specific examples of how to manage advertising client’s expectations. The best way is to make sure you know what their expectations are up front, dispell any misconcieved notions, and then report the results, and help the client interpret them, while always looking forward to the next campaign or product that makes sense for the client.