Managing Customers’ Expectations...let's revisit that.

First, I favour the use of the word “client” over the work “customer”. As some sales gurus teach – customers are people who buy things from you while clients are people who pay professional people for service. [I want to serve clients.]

Second, early in my career I was taught the concept known as managing clients’ expectations. Now, I don’t think that is what we should be trying to do. The managing that needs to be done is self-management, not-client management.

Whether we agree on that second point or not, we agree we do not want to surprise our clients when we know the surprises will be negative from the clients’ perspectives [bad news, problems].  So, most of us believe it is a good to be proactive, to anticipate potential problems, and to put strategies and actions into place to minimize the likelihood of troubling our clients with negative surprises. 

Regardless of our best efforts we know, sooner or later, problems will arise and some of those problems will have a negative impact on our clients.  So, not wanting to surprise our clients, we want to know how to handle those situations and remove or reduce the negative impact on our clients. 

Six thoughts immediately come to mind: remedial action [damage control], disclosure, preconditioning, what I call “over-communication”, lessons learned, and preventative maintenance.

• remedial action [damage control] – Many people work at minimizing the damage they could experience; fewer people work at minimizing their clients could experience. , 
• disclosure – Disclosure of problems and potential damage could expose people to risk; failure to disclose could expand the risks faced by clients., 
• preconditioning – We could work to spin stories that protect us; we could work to help clients prepare for the possibility of damages., 
• over-communication – Some people become annoyed when we repeat ourselves; some people appreciate reminders., 
• lessons learned – Some people fail to learn from their problem-experiences; some people teach others the lessons they have learned through hard knocks., 
• preventative maintenance – We can work to remove our problems before they arrive; we can work to remove clients’ problems before they arrive.

Also - two personal Values immediately come to mind: Courage & Confidence.