The Big Mistake

Let me start with a confession: In the midst of the pandemic — when customers purchased boats faster than we could build them and supply-chain issues plagued the industry — I made the statement that focusing on the customer experience had never been more important.

I was wrong.

The fact is that it’s always important to focus on customer service, the customer experience or whatever you want to call it. And I do mean always.

Now that I’ve admitted what I got wrong about customer service, let me tell you what I think most dealers get wrong about customer service. In regular research, both formal and informal, one of the most common hurdles dealers identify is “unrealistic customer expectations.” I believe this is a convenient excuse. Customer expectations don’t exist as unrealistic or realistic. They are just expectations, and dealers play a role in setting them and meeting them.

Across our industry, we are fond of telling buyers that boating is affordable. Statistics prove the point: The average boat buyer comes from a household with a middle-class income. We also know about the inflation that that soared as the pandemic eased, and we know that the typical buyer tends to come from a household with higher discretionary income.

These facts don’t matter when it comes to the customer experience. What does matter is that there are extremely few, if any, boat buyers who need a boat. We operate firmly in a want-based industry, and there is no reason, aside from their profession possibly mandating a boat, that anyone must have one to survive.

Customers want to spend their excess money with you so that they and their families can participate in a lifestyle that enhances their lives. It is logical and acceptable for them to maintain a high expectation for how they will be treated when they part with their money, especially when boat prices approach those of luxury cars.

Most often, customers want very few things: value for their money, needs fulfilled, problems solved and time valued. The question is: Does your business fulfill and enhance those customer desires, or does it get in the way of them? That’s the intersection of customer expectations and your ability to deliver, and you can control how the two things merge.

At the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, we studied the eight stages of an event experience in 2019, when we rebranded and relaunched Dealer Week, our annual educational conference. What we learned has relevance to any customer experience. The eight stages include announce, attract, anticipate, arrive, enter, engage, exit and extend.

I’d like to call your attention to anticipate. In this phase, we know that event registrants (our customers) create a mental expectation for what they will experience at Dealer Week. The key strategy in this phase acknowledges that those registrants can either create that expectation on their own, or we can help set their expectations. We choose to help set their expectations so they aren’t surprised or disappointed when they arrive. We align their expectations with what the actual experience will be.

Are you aligning expectations for your customers? Or are you letting them set what you might consider are unrealistic expectations?

In a recent nightmare of a customer experience, a software vendor promised our team, in writing, that a critical error in its software would be resolved by a specific (albeit changing) date, 13 separate times. And 13 times, the vendor failed to deliver on the expectation it had set. Did it give us what we wanted? No. Did it solve our problem? No. Did it value our time or money? Clearly, no. It instead called our expectations unrealistic because the “fix” proved harder to achieve. The vendor failed to set proper expectations.

Once you’ve effectively aligned expectations, it becomes a matter of ensuring you meet them. At a recent visit to my car dealer, I wound up without my truck for more than a week. The first issue was that I scheduled an appointment (the dealer set the expectation), and then the dealer didn’t start working on my truck until two days later. Was the dealer’s team busy? Yes. Could they have told me? Yes. Was it inconvenient for me to be without my truck for those extra days? Absolutely.

Then, because the dealer couldn’t replicate or fix the problem, the work was listed as “complete,” but the service writer never called to tell me, leaving me without my vehicle for eight days. To make matters worse, on the drive home, the change-oil light came on. Despite the dealer’s promise to complete a full check of the fluids and systems, the team didn’t bother to tell me the truck needed an oil change. How convenient it would have been to have just had them change the oil while it was already on the lift. Now I had to schedule another visit. Did the dealer solve my problem? No. Did I get what I wanted? No. Did the dealer value my time? No.

Aligning and meeting expectations doesn’t have to be challenging. It takes communications about what your customers should expect, and it takes processes to make sure you deliver on those expectations every time.

Customer service has never been more important than it is today, but we know all too well that customer service is a must-have focus every single day. If you’re looking for ideas to do better, check out MRAA’s “Guide to a World Class Customer Experience” at MRAA.com/StayBoating. 

Matt Gruhn is president of the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas.

This article was originally published in the September 2023 issue.