“Under promise, over deliver” is awful advice

The classic mantra is awful advice. If you’re going to follow it, better rethink the “under” part.

Author

Joe Michalowski
November 22, 2023

I’ll be honest — my mind hasn’t really been on marketing since our last issue.

My wife and I have been working on moving into a new home. Even though it was only a few miles down the road, the moving process is just total chaos (if you know you know).

But if I’m being honest, our move was pretty easy. We had movers (best investment ever), nothing broke, and we’re already feeling settled in after a few days.

Nothing can ever be perfect, though.

And Xfinity made sure of that with a classic case of “over promise, under deliver.”

In 5 days leading up to the appointment, I got at least 3 different messages telling me the same thing:

“We are calling to confirm your appointment on 11/17. You have a guaranteed arrival window of 4pm to 6pm.”

Guaranteed.

Wow, guaranteed? What a nice concept when dealing with cable companies.

And then they doubled down.

They called me 2 hours before my arrival window, said they had a tech available, and asked if I wanted them to come early. 

The earlier time didn’t work for me, so I asked to keep my guaranteed arrival window of 4pm to 6pm.

And they didn’t show up (I know, you didn’t see that coming).

Surface level lesson — don’t make promises (guaranteed) if you can’t execute.

Next level lesson? Don’t swing so far the other way that you underpromise (vague arrival window) and hope to make up for it by over delivering (arriving early in the day). 

This applies to anyone with a customer — that includes you whether your customer is an agency client or an internal stakeholder. 

Do what you say you’re going to do. And do it well. Let the “over deliver” part show up in the results and the experience of working with you.

Purposely underpromising, knowing that you plan to perform better, is a recipe for miscommunication, customer confusion, and poor experiences.

Long story short — don’t be Xfinity. They rolled out “guaranteed arrival windows” 6 years ago…and it hasn’t gone well.

— Joe Michalowski

Featured content

A little self-serving here, but I want to shout out some research my friends Nigel Stevens (OGM) and John Collins (former content lead at Intercom, Ramp). I talk about the survey in my latest episode of Content Head. One of my biggest takeaways? Buyers are still going to Google to research software and say they’re satisfied — but they don’t trust your content at all.

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One last thing…

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Thanks for reading. See you for the next one.

— Joe Michalowski

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