How to Handle Public Expectations When They Are Constantly Changing

Long-term changes in public expectations have shattered the status quo and given rise to several important social movements, including Fridays for the Future, MeToo, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street. Many people are concerned about fairness, wealth inequality, discrimination, and environmental sustainability. The growing demands for greater accountability, equity, fairness, and sustainability are overwhelming business executives.

 Some business leaders choose to stay put, carry on as normal, and trust that their organization will be able to weather the storm if things continue as they are. Others decide to focus their personal and professional efforts on defense tactics that will protect their business from the asteroids that are traveling in their direction.

What is the best way for a leader to balance these conflicting needs? It is essential to implement strategies that make the link between external dangers and fundamental business principles and capacities in order to increase corporate capacity while avoiding asteroids heading your way.

Demonstrate your company’s integrity by effectively monitoring and communicating how your corporate values align with commitments and actions. Be explicit about what “walking your talk” on environmental sustainability or diversity or social justice looks like in practice. How will you know you have manifested your intended organizational values? Implementing values in practice requires ongoing attention and is far more challenging than the making of bold promises. Integrity—the alignment of values, commitments, and actions—is the aim. Pay attention to any gaps in this alignment. This work can bring together leaders, build resilience, solidify the core, and of course, enhance credibility with internal and external stakeholders.

Make sure your organization’s basic principles guide how you react to changing demands. While it is important to monitor how your peers and rivals respond to public requests for social justice, diversity, or fairness, every company has different principles. Leaders are urged to create plans that are based on these distinctive fundamental beliefs. Ask: What drives our company to care about climate change, diversity, social justice, or any other pertinent subject in question? to start this crucial dialogue within your organization. What part do we play in finding solutions?

The capacity of customers to trust a firm will be impacted by a lack of transparency, which is vitally essential for efficiently managing service expectations. Businesses that are honest in all circumstances can guarantee that customers have confidence in their suppliers and great experience. This means that a customer support agent should be honest about seeking advice from other team members if they are unsure of the best solution to a problem. 

Although optimism is crucial for a pleasant customer experience, employees must also remain pragmatic about potential solutions. Support specialists can estimate how a specific ticket will be resolved and the time commitment that will be needed by being familiar with corporate policies, the complexity of specific issues, and the workload of their team members. Although it can be unsettling to inform a client that a problem will take longer than anticipated to fix, it is more crucial to be realistic than to set unattainable standards.

There are many ways businesses can optimize their customer experience strategies. However, the first step to delivering excellence is to manage expectations effectively from the get-go. 

Author Bio: This is an article by Milica Vojnic. She is a Digital Marketing Executive at Wisetek & Wisetek Store, supporting some of the world’s largest IT companies with their used and excess IT equipment.