Speaker 1: Today, we're gonna talk about setting client expectations so that your customer understands what you're doing, why you're doing it, and to prevent any upsets from happening throughout your relationship with them. Hey guys, Abby Johnson here with Matterhorn Business Development. And today, as you can tell, we are talking about setting client expectations. Now, I'm gonna start this off with a personal story of a time when, as a customer, expectations were not set with me from the beginning and how this ended very terribly. Now, I will tell you, I am an easygoing person. I'm pretty easy to please. You tell me you're gonna do something, you do it, and that's all good. I don't ask for too much above and beyond if I'm paying someone for something. But in this scenario, I was upset. So basically what happened is back in 2018, 2019, we were working on publishing my dad's book, "'Fun at Work." Make sure you go check it out. And we had never published a book before. We didn't know what we were doing, right? Greg just sat down and wrote this book. He blasted it out in a few weeks, staying up all night, and it just came pouring out of him, and it was amazing. So we didn't know what to do. Once he had finished writing it, we needed someone to help us actually publish it and get it on Amazon, get it in Kindle format, get it in a printed format. There's a lot of little logistics like that that we don't know about. So we hired a publishing company, a self-publishing company, nothing like Penguin House or Random House or whatever big. And basically they were just like, yeah, we got this, give us your transcript and the illustrations that you want to go with it, and we'll put it all together. But what ended up happening is we sent over our transcript and it was just a Word doc because we don't know any better or any other way to put words down into a computer. And they were like, whoa, why did you format it this way in Microsoft Word? And we said, we don't know any other way. You didn't tell us to give it to you in any other format, but this. They were looking for some sort of special format and we ended up having to pay extra money to have them format it for us. So first of all, that was a little upsetting as the customer because I ended up paying more money than what they had originally told me. Then the proofreading process, apparently they only think they need to go through the book one time. So they went through the book one time and proofread it. I went through and looked at their work and found more errors that they didn't catch. And they said, ah, you know, all books have typos. And that was fine with them. They didn't tell me from the beginning, look, we're gonna just go through this one time and catch any typos. And if there are any other typos, it's on you. If they told me that I would have proofread it myself or had my husband do it or had someone else do it if I knew that they were just gonna go through one pass and not really care if there were typos or not. There were a bunch more other things that I could go into, but you get the idea. As a customer, it was impressed upon me that I was just handing over this transcript and they were gonna turn it into a work of art that could be published in any Kindle or Amazon or physical format that we wanted. But what ended up happening was it was a nightmare. It was a really upsetting process. No one told me what was expected from me as the customer, what I needed to provide. And it ended with me being a very unhappy customer who would never refer business to them. And I actually had to go hire someone else to correct the errors that they did. Okay, so you can tell that that was a pretty bad experience for me. I get a little heated when I'm talking about that experience. But think about how this applies to you and your business and how you could be setting expectations from the beginning. I'll give you another example. So I have a client who does graphic design and I know in any sort of design, my husband does video, so he has to deal with video editing. Any creative field, it can be a lot of back and forth with your customer. You send them what you think is the final product. They want it edited. They don't like a font. They don't like the shade of yellow you used. It can be a very tedious process. And for you as the designer, it's frustrating because you have to keep reopening the file, tweaking things 20 times, right? So what I've been doing with my graphic design client is we are now having a policy at the beginning that she starts at the beginning of the relationship with her client. And she says, look, I'm gonna give you all of these designs, all of these formats, and then I want you to look over it and give me all of your feedback in one go so that I can make all the edits at one time. Because sometimes people will give feedback and then they'll come back and they'll give different feedback on a point that they could have just mentioned earlier. So she's explaining upfront that, hey, if you give me all your feedback at once, this process will go much faster. You'll have your final delivered files much faster and everyone will be happy in the end. So this is a way not only to make sure your customer is happy, but make sure that you are happy working with your customer. You can't get upset at them for making demands or requests when you didn't tell them in the beginning what to expect from you or how your process was going to go. All right, before I wrap this up, I just wanna say, please make sure you go check out our channel sponsors, Metapulse. They are all things growth management, anything you need to track statistics and KPIs, an org chart, a reporting system, a knowledge center system. They have everything you need to manage the growth of your company. So be sure to check them out. So in closing, setting expectations means you are telling the client the step-by-step process of what you're gonna be doing, what to expect from your service or product, what it's going to do for them, everyone being in agreement that that's how it's gonna go and therefore all parties involved being satisfied at the end. So if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and let me know. Leave a comment below and make sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you get notified anytime a new video comes out from us and I will see you next time. You