Should you MEET or EXCEED your customer requirements?

It's not uncommon to see a Quality Policy that boasts, "We will always exceed our customers' expectations!" And that's great. It sounds enthusiastic, ambitious, and challenging. Surely if Quality involves (at least in part) meeting customer expectations, then exceeding them must be even better than that. Maybe it counts as Super-Quality, or something equally special! And the idea takes many forms. Here's a post from LinkedIn which argues that the very definition of Quality in the present day requires exceeding (not merely meeting) customer expectations. 

But is it a good idea?

There's a sense in which it is hard to promise something like this, because you have no control over what your customer actually expects. You may know what requirements he has communicated to you in writing. But his real expectations might go well beyond those. In fact, if you have done business with him before, he may have gotten so accustomed to you over-delivering that now he expects you to over-deliver! If you ever simply meet his stated requirements, he might be secretly disappointed. But of course I'm playing games when I say this. There are other factors to consider.

Most critically, nothing is free. It might be nice to exceed expectations, but make sure you can afford it.

I once worked on a project that suffered seriously from overperformance. The development was late and badly over budget, and all the while the engineers continued to design the product to be better than the customer had asked for. Finally, in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, the Project Office instituted a formal policy of Designing to the Requirements. Stated like that it doesn't sound controversial, but right away the engineers dubbed it the "Just Good Enough" Initiative. One of them complained to me, "My boss just bawled me out for doing too good a job." It was almost as if they had forgotten that all their time and effort cost money, and that at the end of the day the company had books to balance. 

In the end, the final product was magnificent. But it was really tough to get there.

The same discussion comes up in very different contexts. Recently I have seen a spate of articles on the subject of "quiet quitting." Different authors use different definitions, but several have argued that "quiet quitting" is no more than "meeting the expectations" of the job: giving an honest eight hours of work for eight hours of pay, but then going home. Not looking for ways to go above and beyond. Not offering that little bit of extra, unpaid effort that pushes a job over the edge from adequate to superior. Not exceeding expectations. And whether this kind of "quiet quitting" is a good thing depends powerfully on the context and on myriad details: the company, the job, the employee, the home situation, the prospects for the future, and on and on. No one size fits all.

I think that has to be the general answer to the challenge of consistently exceeding customer expectations. It sounds great. It is surely impressive. But no one size fits all.