When you’re starting a new business and opening an office, you become acutely aware of which vendors make life easier for you and which don’t. SBC, for instance, made our lives hard by refusing to recognize our address as extant for our DSL order when they were able to do so for our phone lines. Their field technician further compounded the problem by refusing to call us on our cells (as instructed by a sign) when we left for ten minutes out of our 8-hour service window to get lunch.
Conversely, my favorite example of meeting customer expectations came from Bank of America today. Someone in our had given UPS bad information when they tried to deliver our checks from BofA, telling them we were moving out rather than in. So, they had sent back our checks to BofA, who destroyed them as a security measure. I asked the customer service rep if the rushed reorder was going to cost us any extra:
"No," he said, "unless you want it to cost you extra. We could accomodate that."
You’ll never go broke if you always meet customer expectations.