The Power of Expectations
Carlton Hoyt
For most of you reading this, your company will have a LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t require much – upload your logo, post some basic company info, and copy-paste a paragraph or two from the “about” page of your website and you’re just about set. We looked at 408 life science tools and services companies and found that 69 did not have LinkedIn profiles – that’s only 17%. So why bring it up?
The important number here isn’t the 17% of companies lacking LinkedIn profiles. It’s the 83% that do. When an overwhelming number of companies do something, it affects the market’s expectations. You may be so used to finding LinkedIn pages for a company that when you can’t or don’t, something strikes you as being wrong. If you’re one of those 17% of companies lacking a LinkedIn profile, that doesn’t reflect well upon your brand.
Of course, this rule doesn’t only apply to LinkedIn profiles. It extends to any element of customer experience across any touch point. If someone calls your customer service or sales line and they press 0, they expect to be able to speak with a person. The navigation for your website should be in a bar at the top of the page and / or at the top of the left sidebar. These examples may be obvious, but they illustrate the point. Breaking customer expectations without a good reason depreciates the experience that the customer is having.
Audience expectations can also be used to your advantage. By breaking expectations you can create a feeling of uniqueness or potentially make people pause and think about something. Any such attempt, however, needs to be carefully considered. In breaking the expectation, would you be annoying the audience? If so, would the benefit outweigh the drawback? (In our initial example of LinkedIn profiles, the answer seems to be “no” – there is no reasonable benefit to not having a company profile.)
Through attentiveness to audience expectations you can improve customer experience, fomenting a more positive brand impression. Going against expectations can also be used to your advantage. Regardless of your intention, when crafting customer contact points, be considerate of customer expectations to create more effective experiences.