Managing Customer Expectations with Jagdish Sheth

With growing age, income, and ethnic diversity, customer expectations are also becoming more diverse. Therefore, it is becoming difficult to satisfy all customers with growing but divergent expectations. This course, taught by Professor Jagdish Sheth, 2020 Padma Bhushan Award winner for Literature and Education, suggests shaping customer expectations is as, if not more, important than exceeding customer expectations. There are three strategies to manage customer expectations: abandon the customer, accommodate the customer, and adjust customer expectations. Since not all customers are profitable, one must link managing customer expectations with profitability outcomes.

• How to Manage Diverging Customer Expectations (parts 1 and 2)
• Customer expectations are increasingly divergent. Therefore, companies must learn how to manage diverging expectations in addition to exceeding customer expectations. We are very selective with recruiting employees and we need to similarly be selective when choosing customers. Customer selectivity is very key for managing customer expectations and we need to learn to “fire” customers. For instance, airlines have banned unruly customers.
• How to Manage Diverging Customer Expectations (parts 3 and 4)
• This module suggests how human resource practices and employee selection and retention can be an effective analog for customer selection and customer retention. Employee selectivity, career development, promotion, and retirement are useful to apply to customer selectivity, customer lifetime value, customer promotion, and customer retirement.