Managing the Expectations of Your Service Customers

If you are a consultant, coach, or service provider I'm sure you've heard these comments from your customers:

• Can we just throw in this one more little thing?
• I know we talked about X, but I don't see it here.

The reality is that customers don't understand what you do for them: that's why they come to you for your assistance. That "one little thing" they ask for is rarely little, nor is it just one thing. Also, during the course of multiple conversations while you try to work out what the job will entail, many possibilities are discussed and some items are approved while others are not. It is not uncommon for one side of the discussion to get confused about what was finally decided, unless both sides keep good notes.

Of course, there's one elementary solution to this problem: Make sure you have a clearly-written contract and scope of work. But even if you have both, you can still end up in conversations that start with the comments I mentioned above. Those conversations happen partly because customers don't read the contract and scope of work, and partly because they don't really make the connection between the scope of work and the quote you give them to do the job.

The real problem comes back to the fact that customers don't understand what you do. You can't manage their expectations with a piece of paper, but you can't expect them to learn what you do, either. What you can do is put the relationship between the scope of work and the quote into terms they'll understand.

After having many of these conversations myself, I've come up with two customer guidelines that apply to virtually any service business:

• If it costs me time, it costs you money.
• If it is not spelled out in the scope of work, it is not part of the job.

These guidelines may sound obvious, but experience shows that your customers won't "get it" the first few times, and some never will. You could say that the latter are the customers with "unmanageable expectations."

If you have a customer who has difficulty with the two guidelines, don't worry, you have a fallback position. When they ask you to expand the scope of work after the quote has been accepted, break out the secret weapon question:

• Would you like me to put that item on the wish list for the next quote, or do you want me to do it now and bill it on an hourly invoice?

The secret weapon question is an instant reminder of the two guidelines. Ask it often enough, and even the most stubborn customers are likely to latch on eventually.

I'm sure I really sound like a hard-ass here. Hopefully you detected a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek in my tone. The truth is that sometimes you give extra work away, or you realize that you meant to include the item the customer asks about. I usually expect a certain amount of "tweaking" along the way, because you can never anticipate everything about the job. But I can tell you this: the customers who are most likely to get "freebies" from me are the ones who understand and appreciate the extra work they are getting. It can't be part of their expectations.