The Story

As business people, we talk a lot about “managing expectations.” That’s a fancy way to say, often, “let’s set the bar low enough to make sure we jump over it.” You know what I mean…gotta make sure you don’t over-promise and then under-deliver.

But there’s a whole different side of expectation management, I’ve come to learn. To protect those on the receiving end of my wrath, I’ll create a hypothetical-but-realistic situation that a bank may encounter.

1. The bank has a very strong and distinct brand—it stands for environmentalism
2. The bank does a great job of telling and proving that story…and it communicates very clearly to its customers that it is about environmentalism.
3. The customer says, “I know you’re all about environmentalism, and that’s what I like about you. I know you provide all statements electronically to save paper.”
4. Two months later, the customer gets a friendly call from the bank, who says “Hey there, I wanted to check in with you because I notice you’ve bounced a few checks. I’m waiving the fees for you, but I wanted to make sure everything’s OK.”
5. The customer is surprised to hear about the overdrafts, and realizes it’s because they have forgotten to balance their check book. They weren’t used to getting e-statements, and as a result it screwed up their longstanding routines and they simply forgot to balance from the e-statements.
6. The customer says, “uh oh, I think I should go back to getting paper statements.”
7. But the bank says, “sorry, we only offer e-statements. Remember, we’re proving our environmentalism story.”
8. Now the customer is frustrated and mad because the bank won’t provide paper statements, and ready to move their accounts.

So what happened? The bank set the expectation appropriately, made it super clear, and then delivered on it exactly as promised. But the customer realizes that they expectations they committed to weren’t actually what they wanted.

I consider this the more frustrating side of expectation management. In the example above, how many times does the bank need to say, “are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to be part of our environmentalism? You’ll have to get outside your comfort zones and routines.” It turns out the customer’s head nod doesn’t necessarily really mean they ARE sure.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Bank Branding, Credit Union Branding, Bank Marketing, Touch points, Branding, Corporate branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.