I feel the pain with regards credt card statements. The process seems to be well defined when it comes to advising you that they have issued a late payment fee. I would really start to think of myself as a valued customers if they took the trouble to give me the ‘heads up’ that I was in risk of an additional fee for whatever reason.

From the field service world, there are similarities with the concept of “expectation management”. Essentially this is about making it easy for service companies to continually keep the customer informed as to a technician’s estimated arrival time. Skilled expectation management is critical for achieving customer satisfaction, and close communication is an inseparable part of managing expectations. By offering email, text messaging, voice messaging and Internet-based service appointment booking as the communication media, service comapnies can now take advantage of the wide spectrum of today’s anytime/anywhere communications technologies. The question is do they value their customers’ time enough?