Two recent stories; one point to make.
Another Mac issue. My trusty MacBook had an odd smell coming out of it. That electronics burning, uh oh, kind of smell. It was in passing but the Ethernet port stopped working. The Apple genius says, ruh oh, fried board. They have to order one and then it will take 3 or 4 days based on workload to get it back to me. I keep the machine until I get a call the next day. Part is in, come on by. I drop by on Saturday morning and check my sick puppy in. They say, yeah, based on backlog, 3 or 4 days. That evening at 6:30p, I get a call from the Apple store. All fixed, come get it.
Sweet!
I was inviting somebody to connect on LinkedIn and I got this warning notice that said be careful lots of people are ignoring you or some such. Very weird since ever single LinkedIn invite I’ve sent has been accepted (I track em) or bounced because of people’s email addresses. I sent a note to customer service asking for the explanation of the error message and I got back the standard email acknowledging my note and indicating they’d get back to me shortly. About 24 hours later, I get back a nice note from “Stacey” removing this warning and giving me a full explanation of what/how/why, etc.
Nice.
My point to you and your startup is from the second you start to interact with the fickle public (like me) you are on the expectation setting treadmill and you need to be in seriously good shape to stay on it. There are services I use and products I buy which have choices driven totally by the expectations met/exceeded.
To all the software startups who have sent me ‘instant responses’ on questions or bugs, it’s a great investment to get a loyal customer.
Set expectations and blow them away. Your competition will be forced to follow and if it isn’t in their DNA, you get the advantage.
Good blog post, very true stuff. I'm constantly thinking about my expectations for companies and services, and I'm unfortunately starting to see a trend where they get smashed to the ground.
I truly think you hit the nail on the head with stating that you gotta have that expectation level built into your DNA, and if another company doesn't, they are going to have one hell of a time catching up.
I'm impressed that you got such good turn around despite the quote on time from Apple, but perhaps they are great at under-promising and over-delivering on service? Either way it worked, and you enjoyed it enough to blog and talk about it! That's worth a lot!
Of course the reverse is also true, as soon as someone doesn't meet your expectations, you are going to talk about it and let people know, and perhaps more fervently!
I recently got stabbed in the back by my favourite brand and it sucks, I have no one to get excited about anymore, and I'm pissed that I wasted so much time idolizing and promoting a company who couldn't care less about my business or efforts! Talk about expectations! They don't exist anymore.
I even tried to use social media (Twitter) to get some justice and to help me recover my expectations of this brand, and it's worked before with some other companies, but it only ended up just making things a whole lot worse!
If anyone is interested in reading about my experience, take a look here:
http://ivanstechroundup.blogspot.com/2009/06/samsung-is-new-sony-thats-bad.html
Posted by: Ivan | July 13, 2009 at 15:13
Low expectations are the key to success! The only time you can afford to have high expectations is when it is with yourself.
However, they must read your blog and know you... My iMac is having some serious heat issues, I call them up to ask if it is normal. Nope, it isn't -- nice lady on the phone says that under normal operation I should be around 45C (according to her book).
I take it in, and I'm told 3-5 days. I call on the 7th day asking what's going on, they tell me they don't know yet. Finally on the 9th or 10th day I get a call that everything is done, ready to go.
"Hardware Repair - Level 1" is all they can tell me. I get *nothing* else out of them as far as what is going on.
Get home, turn the computer on. After a few hours of routine work it's back to running above 60C+ with visual artifacts on the screen.
Yay. Thanks for nothing Apple.
If I didn't expect -all- hardware to be terrible, I'd be upset. Now, I'll probably just shell out more money for a Mac Pro after this one inevitably meets a premature death.
But I'll be upset about it.
Maybe.
Posted by: Jay Shirley | July 13, 2009 at 18:38
You should sign up for Apple's ProCare. I think it's $99 a year and it means same-day service in almost all cases. If my MacBook goes down, so does my ability to work effectively. Of course, having a Time Capsule with 60 minute old backups and spare machines around certainly helps (and which I have), but it's nothing like getting the main computer back fast. :-)
Posted by: Neil Wainwright | July 14, 2009 at 10:44