“Yes of course, all this formats are also included in our proposal” or “Sure, we can deliver the entire campaign within the next month” are typical confirmational answers of someone in an agency telling the client that everything will run as she/he expects it. Sometimes those things are said without checking internal the do-ability of the things or even with knowing that they can’t delivered just to please the client.
I have experienced many such situation in my early agency years where the more senior staff just was blindfold promising things to the client to make a good appealing in front of them. Sometimes this game played out, but sometimes it was not possible to deliver the over-promised stuff and the client as a normal reaction got pissed. And furthermore also the internal agency’s staff who was involved in the delivery is as well pissed at their execs and sometimes also the client. This is a complete unwanted and terrible situation, but is so common in many agencies out there.
When I turned into my senior and director roles I instinctively tried to avoid the situations but there is also valid scientific evidence to do so. It is called the Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT) originated from the research domains of consumer research and social psychology.
What is the Expectation Confirmation Theory?
The theory tries to explain that the satisfaction with a service or product is an outcome of the evaluation of the performance against the expectation. The evaluation is then triggering a cognitive adjustment of the expectation and an shrinking satisfaction.
So to put it very simple: when ever you over-promise something and are not able to keep your promise, you are destroying the trust and satisfaction of the client. Where as promising realistic quality and then over-deliver it, results in increased client satisfaction.
There is also a popular quote from management thinker Tom Peters summarizing it:
This quote captures the essence of the strategy that suggests it is better for companies to manage customer expectations conservatively and then exceed those expectations, rather than making exaggerated promises that might be difficult to fulfill. Indeed it is quite controversial and there is a lot of discussion on it be valid or completely nonsense.
What to do then?
Many critics of Peters quote say, that when a company is under-promising over time, it will fall behind competitors and never will develop the drive to create outstanding delivery. There is some essence in it but the key element in all the discussion here is: to be able to deliver and be aware of the factor of it. Communicating a realistic deliverable to the client and from time to time over-deliver is the key to a long-lasting valuable client relationship.
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