“Mind the Gap” - How to Manage Growth of Customer's Expectations

Maintaining good relationships with a customer over a long period of time has never been an easy task especially in the case of remote collaboration. Why the customer that was loyal to the vendor at the beginning of their collaboration looses the loyalty after 1 or 2 years of collaboration even though the level of provided services remains the same? One of the reasons of such situation are customer's expectations that grow over time and exceed the actual experience that customer gets from the vendor (a remote development team). This article gives some practical steps that the vendor development team can undertake to address the growth of customer's expectations by improving customer's experience of their collaboration. The improvement of experience is achieved by regular actions aimed towards demonstrating value that the development team brings to the customer. The article shows the importance of understanding by all team members the real value that the team brings to the customer through its projects, recognizing this value in their regular activities and demonstrating this value to the customer thus providing better visibility of team achievements. The article uses term "expectation gap " (e-gap) to show the difference between the level of experience and expectations. We demonstrate that monitoring of e-gap dynamics and keeping its value positive over time is essential for ensuring long-term collaboration.