May 10, 2009
Posted by Ryan Graves
Building Your Brand: Follow Through on Customer Expectation
I was checking out the new site 100twt.com that follows the top 100 most followed Twitterers when I came across this tweet from Diddy. This is a call out from Diddy asking his followers for inspirational quotes. Below are his next week of Tweets. See any RT’s?
No retweets (RT’s) at all. At first I was pretty disappointed and I started writing this post pointing out how important it is to follow through with your promises. In personal life as in business, when you make a promise to people, they have an expectation of what they will receive from you, and it is imperative that you deliver upon that promise, their loyalty to you depends on it. This is why McDonald’s is so successful. When you go into Mac D’s anywhere in the world, you expect the same experience, and because of McDonald’s impeccable ability to replicate the process of making your hamburger in sub 3 minutes, you receive that burger, and it tastes exactly the same.
Now, I completely understand that Diddy’s business is not to RT his followers quotes, so this might not seem like a big deal. However, it may be yours. If you’re on Twitter or other social networks for business or even if it’s only personal, your credibility is at stake if you don’t follow through on your promises.
On Rebecca Morgan’s blog “Grow Your Key Talent“, she says of fulfilling promises:
Companies can pay millions of dollars in advertising their superior service. But if their staff doesn’t actually deliver that service, all that advertising does is set up expectations that aren’t met, then you get unhappy customers.
Then I started hunting through some of the tweets that came into @iamdiddy because I wanted to see the quotes that came in that he wasn’t RT’ing. A few of his followers were pissed that he didn’t share their quotes, but most people appear to love following Diddy. (He is very positive)
Some really good quotes were sent in, with no follow through. Diddy will not likely lose followers just because he didn’t follow through on his promise to retweet quotes but you’re not Diddy and neither is your company. Customer expectation and your follow through on the delivery of that expectation is critical to build customer loyalty. Put a process in place that won’t disappoint. Be McDonalds. Work hard to build up an expectation from your customers, advertise this promised expectation, then do you damndest to deliver on that expectation. It’s important.
