Customer reception: making promises you can keep
An application for authorisation, a public health enquiry, a telecom outage or a technical complaint often prompts a request for immediate reassurance. The management question is precise: how can front-line staff reassure people without turning a possibility into a commitment to deliver a particular outcome?
What the literature establishes
Richard L. Oliver (1980, Journal of Marketing Research) proposes and tests a model in which satisfaction depends partly on expectations and on whether experience confirms or disconfirms them. Perceived quality is therefore not assessed independently of what someone anticipated. At the first point of contact, an assurance about the outcome of a request can help establish the benchmark against which the subsequent experience will be judged.
Disappointment and positive surprise do not balance out
Eugene W. Anderson and Mary W. Sullivan (1993, Marketing Science) find, in the data they analyse, that quality falling short of expectations has a greater effect on satisfaction than quality exceeding expectations in the opposite direction. This asymmetry provides an additional reason to examine assurances made before service delivery. It does not, however, supply a universal rule for calculating the cost of a broken promise.
The premature conclusion
It might seem that lowering expectations is all it takes to improve satisfaction. These studies do not demonstrate that systematically promising less improves the relationship: expectations themselves contribute to evaluations, and an unambitious promise may make a service unattractive. The managerial approach is therefore not to offer less reassurance, but to distinguish what is certain, conditional or still unknown. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These articles address how satisfaction develops, rather than reporting a comparative trial of wording used by front-line teams in Bernese organisations. They do not establish that a particular phrase reduces complaints, or that satisfaction alone is an adequate measure of quality. In public administration or public health, accurate information may be unwelcome while remaining the appropriate response.
A practical check in Berne
As part of SHR's « Accueil client » programme, a team in Berne could spend two weeks examining outcome commitments in a consecutive sample of written responses, without retaining personal data. At a federal administration counter, in a public health service, at a telecom operator or in a precision engineering company, each commitment would be checked against documented rules, authority and dependencies: could front-line staff guarantee that outcome when they responded? The indicator would be the proportion of commitments lacking a documented basis among the outcome commitments examined, with unverifiable cases reported separately. After working on wording, repeating the review within the same scope would allow the team to check for changes in practice, without mistaking them for proof of improved satisfaction. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Bern
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