On reflection there is one immutable, ironclad law when it comes to customer experience:

Satisfaction always depends on expectations.

This is why two brands with completely different levels of service can both have satisfied customers. We expect different things from a low cost motel and a five star resort, for example.

With this in mind, the basis of every excellent customer experience is understanding, setting and meeting expectations, and every service failure, complaint or disappointment is in some way an expectation issue — facts that are systematically ignored by most businesses and even swathes of the CX profession itself.

No joke, I bought eight popular books on journey mapping recently and the word expectation didn’t even appear in the index of any one of them, let alone get comprehensive coverage. But if your journey map doesn’t explicitly capture the expectations customers have and expectations that must be set for each stage of the journey you are leaving the very thing you are seeking to improve to chance.

Simply put, if you do not know what your customers expect, do not set clear expectations and do not reset their expectations when something changes you cannot satisfy them. The good news is that most organizations are so bad at this stuff that getting it right is probably enough to stand head and shoulders above the competition.

See this post on LinkedIn