Nothing has more impact on our perception of an experience than our expectations. Yet expectation management is often a weakness, not a strength of most CX programs. Look at most journey maps and if they even include a swim lane for expectations (most don’t), it’s typically something wooly.

If you don’t know what customers expect how can you possibly know whether they’ll be happy, unhappy or if your changes will make a difference? You can't.

15 years ago Berry & Parasuraman proposed a helpful model. Customers, they observed, have a continuum of expectations where two boundaries are important: what they consider adequate, and what they deem ideal. Between is a Zone of Tolerance where interactions are acceptable, yet forgettable.

By contrast, interactions that are below adequate or positively deviate from our ideal expectation are more memorable, so dominate our perception of the experience.

1. If we don’t know what those expectations are, we can’t know where to focus, wasting time and money on paper improvements that have no impact.

2. Aim to have nothing below adequate, a couple of positive “memory maker” interactions and everything else in the ZoT.

3. The top of a journey map should look a bit like the (much simplified) pic.

4. Read Berry’s Book: Marketing Services👌

See this post on LinkedIn