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Why Customer Expectations Seem So Unreasonable (And What To Do About It)

Writer's picture: Amber ReynoldsAmber Reynolds

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There will always be customers who expect things that make you go, “Why the fuck did you expect that?!”


Your natural reaction may be to huff, get mad, and vent to a friend about that “entitled” or “delusional” customer you had today.


Unreasonable expectations come with the territory of dealing with humans. The sources of those unreasonable expectations are far less malicious and more understandable than you may think.


WHY IT MATTERS:

Being able to meet customer expectations is the foundation of creating craveable customer experiences. If you can’t do that, nothing else you do will matter.


If you want to be able to charge more for your services and build customer loyalty, make an effort to understand how customer expectations are created - however unreasonable they may be. Once you understand the source, you'll be better prepared to reshape them into reasonable expectations.


WHAT’S NEXT:

  • 8 Reasons Why Customers Have Unreasonable Expectations

  • Why Customers Seem To Overreact

  • 5 Ways To Minimize & Manage Unreasonable Expectations



8 Reasons Why Customers Have Unreasonable Expectations

Our brains are powerful little prediction machines. They're constantly looking to figure out what will happen next. While it may not feel like it some days, most of the 35,000 decisions we make every day are done automatically.


As clever as our brains often are, they make mistakes in predictions all of the time. They use whatever information they have at hand to make educated guesses. And therein lies the main source of why customers have unreasonable expectations.


Their brains have faulty information to make predictions on what to expect.


There are eight common sources of information that can influence what a customer expects from you. The interesting thing about these is that they aren't always wrong predictions - just wrong for you in particular.


Customers Are Ignorant

Ignorant isn’t a bad thing - we don’t know what we don’t know.


I’ll happily admit that I’m ignorant about all sorts of things. How the internet works, how to drive a stick shift, or how to go to social events without wanting to hide in the corner.


Why would I know how to do any of those things if someone hasn’t taught me or I haven’t gone out of my way to learn?


Customers are hiring you for a reason - and the biggest one is usually because they don’t know.

You’ve dedicated a lot of time, energy, and money to becoming an expert at what you do. You can’t expect customers to know things that now seem obvious to you.


Try this: Educate potential customers with beginner content and resources. For example, you might create articles or videos about topics like “10 Things Professional Organizers Can Help You Do” or “What Handymen Wish Clients Knew.”


Generational Expectations

If your customer comes from a different generation, things were done differently throughout their life.


And if you feel the need to say, “Well, things are different now!” in a huff, then I fully expect you to keep up with every service and how they evolve until the day you take your dirt nap.


The older we get, the more information and experiences we have to pull from. That can lead to what appears to be unreasonable expectations, even though they weren't unreasonable at the time.


Try This: Ask questions about preferences. For example, you might ask if they prefer to communicate via phone, email, or text. Older generations may prefer a phone call reminder about an appointment, whereas younger generations would love a text instead.


Cultural Expectations

Even if you don’t typically work with customers from other countries, there are often major cultural differences within a country.


The US, for example, has an insane number of different cultures, each with its own sub-cultures.


Compare the direct and fast-paced nature of Northerners to the slow-paced, warm-naturedness of Southerners.


Or customers from rural versus urban areas. Don't even get me started on Texans. They have an entire culture of their own.


Each culture comes with inherited expectations. If they leave their culture or you set up shop where they are, you're going to run into possible mismatched expectations that seem unreasonable to you.


Try this: If you know you’re likely to have a diverse customer base, make an effort to learn about the cultures you encounter and try to use clear, inclusive language in any collateral that you create.


Tangentially Related Experience Expectations

When we don’t know what to expect, we often rely on past experiences to help us predict what might happen next, even if those experiences are only loosely related.


For example, if someone asked you to describe Australia’s weather but you’ve never been, how would you come up with an answer? You might think of a trip you took to New Zealand, assuming they have similar climates since the countries are often linked in conversation. Or, you might recall a National Geographic special about kangaroos and desert landscapes, pulling predictions from that.


You’d perhaps get some things right, but you’d also be laughably incorrect on others —like the fact that much of Australia is hot and has a dry heat, while New Zealand is cooler and more humid.


Your customers do the same thing. If they’ve never used a service like yours, they’ll draw from their own tangential experiences to form expectations, which can lead to expectations that baffle you.


Try this: Create content or resources that highlight common misconceptions between your service and tangentially related experiences customers have pulled their expectations from. For example, sharing the differences between a babysitter and au pair.


Previous Experience Expectations

Origami swans made from hand towels

If a customer has hired a service like yours before, they’re naturally going to pull expectations from it into your service.


If their last three house cleaners folded their bathroom hand towels into origami swans - it’ll feel like a loss to them if you don't.


Is it fair? Of course not.


But customers aren’t doing it intentionally, either.


Try this: Ask what they loved about their previous experiences and what they would like to see done differently. This can provide you an opportunity to see what would be important to them, and you can adjust expectations as needed.


Second-Hand Expectations

Let’s say you’re a mobile car detailer. Your customer’s cousin Sally hired a different mobile car detailer, who included steam cleaning the fabric at the top of their car. Your customer heard from Sally how great it felt to have their car detailed, so they hired you.


Because of what your customer heard from good ol’ cousin Sally, they’re unintentionally expecting the same details included in your service. If steam cleaning the fabric on the ceiling of the car is not included in your service offerings, then your customer may be peeved when they still see a stain from their kid’s chocolate milk on the fabric of the ceiling of their car.


When customers are looking to hire a service, I can almost guarantee you part of that process is that they ask friends, family, or people online about what to expect.


And holy shit, is that a recipe for unreasonable expectations.


Try this: Create a “what's included checklist" for customers to review before they hire you to help reset unreasonable expectations.


They Don’t Understand What’s Involved Or The Difficulty Level

Customers often come in knowing enough to be dangerous.


Thanks to things like Pinterest and TikTok, customers may think a lot of services seem simple or are low-skill.


Look at house cleaning, for example. An ignorant person may think, “You just need some rags, Windex, a vacuum, and a little elbow grease, right?”


When in reality, great house cleaners have to have a wealth of knowledge to not only clean your house but to prevent from accidentally damaging your property. There are tricks of the trade that clean things faster and safer or help prevent things from reaching a certain level of griminess again.


If you’re amazing at the service you offer, chances are you make it look easy. When things look easy, customers assume that they are easy or that they don’t take much time.


This can quickly turn into customers thinking that asking for something isn’t a big deal, not understanding why it’s expensive, or why it takes way longer than they think it should.


Try this: Create content that shows more in-depth looks at what goes into the service that you provide. You can show things like what you do step-by-step, the time it takes to complete the service, information about the equipment you use, and how you learned what you know.


They’re Feeling Squeezed, Too

In today’s climate, where even eggs are expensive, people are more focused than ever to get as much value out of their purchases as they can.


Along with being dollar-conscious, customers are more time and resource-conscious than ever.

When every dollar, minute, and drop of energy counts, customers can lose sight of what’s reasonable.


Try this: Put customers at ease by highlighting how your service and process saves them time, energy, and money in the long term.


Why Customers Seem To Overreact

Imagine going to your favorite restaurant, excited to order the same burger you always do.


You’ve been looking forward to it all week. You take a big bite, and it’s exactly as you expected: juicy, perfectly cooked, and it has that satisfying crunch from the veggies. Your brain floods with dopamine, and you do the yummy food dance in your chair.


In an alternate shitty universe, the restaurant’s chef has been watching Master Chef too much and felt inspired to experiment with the spice mix used to make your burger patty.


Completely unaware of this change, you take a bite, and you recoil at the taste. It didn’t live up to what you were dreaming about, and now you’re super annoyed. They ruined your burger.


It’s not even that the burger is bad - had you been aware of the change, you may have really liked it. But it wasn’t what you expected.

A woman throwing a towel on the ground and stomping on in - having a tantrum

When our expectations aren’t fulfilled...well, let’s just say our brains don’t like discrepancies. A customer’s behavior or attitude after an expectation hasn’t been met is about a lot more than what you may perceive as entitlement.

  • The discrepancy has left them feeling anxious and unsure

  • They’re emotionally invested in the service, and it feels like a huge setback, even if you know that it’s not

  • They feel like they’ve been wronged or duped

  • It’s the cherry on top of many other missed expectations recently (whether from you or other service providers in general)

  • The missed expectation feels personal

  • They’ve been screwed over before and see this as a sign it’s going to happen again


This is not a blank check for customers to behave badly. However, it does make it easier to extend grace when customers cop a bit of an attitude or are acting frustrated when you understand what’s going on.


How To Minimize & Manage Unreasonable Expectations

You’ll never be able to prevent all unreasonable expectations. Some customers are truly entitled and delusional.


What you can do is focus on what you can control to help minimize what you can and have tools in your toolbox to de-escalate the intensity of the moment.


You’d be surprised at how often customers will come around once their lizard brain calms down and the rational part picks back up.


Set Expectations (Duh)

As you’ll often hear me say - set expectations, or your customers will do it for you. And then both of you will lose.


This is especially true if your services deviate from industry norms or what is often seen in other services.


It doesn’t mean you need to change your service offerings, but it does mean that you need to be very clear on what may be different from what a customer may be expecting.


Learn To Communicate Better

Poor communication can show up in a lot of different ways.

  • When we’re new in our business, we tend to overexplain and cause information overload.

  • When we’ve been in our business a long time, we can sometimes take that knowledge for granted. We assume that people understand certain details that seem obvious to us.

  • We use industry jargon that customers may not understand.

  • We use $10 words when a $2 word would have been clearer.

  • We sent information that was difficult to read either because of the volume or structure.

  • We use ambiguous language (for example, bi-weekly - did you mean every other week or twice a week?)


If there is one skill that I could pinpoint to dramatically increase a customer’s ability to have reasonable expectations, it’s learning to communicate better.


If you want a crash course in communicating better, I’d suggest reading the book Smart Brevity.


Ask Better Questions

You may find yourself asking customers questions like:


  • Do you have any questions?

  • Does that make sense?

  • Do you feel like you understand the process?


Questions like these are difficult for customers to answer and won’t provide any real assurance that they get it. They require yes-or-no answers, and they are almost too big and vague for customers to be able to answer honestly.


Instead, try questions like:

  • What part of the service are you most concerned about?

  • What part of the service are you most excited about?

  • What’s one thing about the service that feels unclear for you?


Open-loop questions like these are more specific, which helps the customer give you a better answer. Because your customer is providing more information, you can pinpoint areas that could lead to unreasonable expectations and also ask follow-up questions to dig deeper.


Be Curious

If there’s one thing that customers manage to do best, it’s to find creative ways to totally baffle us.

Even after all of your efforts to manage expectations well, some will still find a way to create unreasonable ones anyway.


When that happens, get curious about how they got to that expectation. (You can scream into a pillow later.)


A gift that says, "Alright. Uh, I'm gonna go scream into my pillow for a little while."

You won’t be able to prevent every unreasonable expectation, but as you run across them, see if you can identify why they’re happening. Then, you can attempt to find ways to minimize that particular expectation from happening in the future.


Or, at the very least, you can create a better screening process to avoid those types of customers.


Stay Calm & Be Understanding

From a customer’s perspective, their expectations aren’t unreasonable. Lead the conversation by staying calm and understanding.


When you show understanding and empathy, it doesn’t mean you agree with them or that you’re going to ignore your business processes. So don’t be afraid to acknowledge their feelings and extend an olive branch: “I hear where you’re coming from. Let’s work together to find a solution.”


THE BIG TAKEAWAY

It’s important to remember that customers who come in with unreasonable expectations aren’t usually doing so out of a sense of entitlement. Their expectations are heavily influenced by things outside of your control. Once you better understand where those unreasonable expectations are coming from, you can better manage their expectations and create better customer experiences.




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