Delight customers, why and how? Isn’t customer satisfaction sufficient? As a keynote speaker and event host who has spoken and performed in front of over 5 million people, I know that there is a big difference between customer enthusiasm and customer satisfaction.
An enthusiastic audience drives me to achieve even more. For me, enthusiasm is associated with magic moments, with emotions that positively influence the emotional connection between customers and a product or brand.
But how can such moments be created? This article will give you strategies, ideas and tips on how to do just that.
Why delight customers?
To satisfy or to delight customers – that is the question here. To delight customers means to exceed their expectations. Creating moments of happiness for them – magic moments. Supplying them with positive emotions or simply surprising them.
Customer satisfaction, on the other hand, means to merely fulfill his expectations. That’s not a bad thing. But a customer who is only satisfied will not get involved more deeply and promote your brand. Maybe he’ll become a regular customer, but you can’t count on it.
Isn’t customer satisfaction sufficient?
Anyone who sells something has to think entrepreneurially. The business has to run, so a minimum of customer orientation is needed. Everyone agrees on that. And that’s why many consider it sufficient to merely satisfy customers. Further activities to increase customer loyalty are considered a waste of resources.
However, there is also common sense that a negative customer experience is not beneficial to customer retention. Therefore, it is dangerous for a company to focus solely on customer satisfaction and to surf on the edge of dissatisfaction. It is better creating customer delight and paying higher attention to outstanding customer experiences.
Why is customer delight important?
To delight customers is the best way to increase customer loyalty. Those who are enthusiastic about your products and your customer service staff don’t even think about switching to the competition.
What’s more, such highly loyal customers will act as brand advocates for your products. They will automatically do word of mouth marketing work for you. They are more tolerant when something goes wrong and can be quickly reconciled with good service.
Define your goals
The options you have to delight customers are obviously not the same in each type of industry. Fewer people are enthusiastic about accounting software than about a car with great features, even if the former is definitely imaginable.
That’s why it’s important to know what you want to achieve with your company. In this article, you’ll find a few ideas and tips on how you can create incentives for more customer enthusiasm for different products and services.
What does customer delight look like?
Exceed expectations, evoke emotions, create positive experiences and provide personal memories. Customer delight has many faces, but above all, happy faces.
Customer experience
The customer experience, also known as CX, is an experience linked to a specific phase of the customer journey which is a process that describes the different stages of the customer-product life cycle.
It starts with the moment when someone realizes that he has a need. It continues with the identification of solutions – goods or services that can be used to satisfy the need – and extends to the order, the purchase and beyond.
That’s because positive customer experiences such as unpacking and using the product can be an important topic associated with magic moments.
Taking a page from sports: Do you have customers or fans?
I have hosted a great many sporting events and can draw on my personal experience to make many useful comparisons. After all, delighted customers are nothing more than fans and you can count on them as lifelong customers.
That’s why it’s worth taking a look at the emotional journey of a football fan, which begins early on:
- Waiting in line with like-minded people before admission
- Merchandise stands, snacks and drinks in the outdoor area
- Atmospheric music in the interior
- 45 minutes before kick-off the teams warm up and make initial contact with their supporters
- The team line-ups are read out shortly before the match begins, with the involvement of the fans
- The club anthem/national anthem is played just before the kick-off
When the match starts, the fans are in the mood for total emotional involvement and maximum support for their team. There are chants and choreographed displays.
This also happens in other sports. Show elements increasingly emphasize the event character. Want some examples?
- Boxing fights or a big darts tournament: ring announcers and masters of ceremony fire up the audience before each duel
- Basketball or handball professional games in the hall: individual presentation of the players with a lot of ballyhoo
- Finals at the Olympic swimming and athletics competitions: the participants enter with a big light show
How can all this be transferred to the world of business? How can you design customer interaction to turn your customers into real fans?
How do you create customer delight?
Now it’s time to get down to business. What can you do to generate customer delight? Before I get to the specific strategies, tools and ideas, which I’ll illustrate with a few examples, it’s time for analysis first.
Get to know your target audience
Who are your company’s target customers and what do they want? To understand this, you need to analyze a few data.
Always remember that your product should provide a solution for the customer. Problem solving must be understood as your competitive advantage and as the basis of your business success. It is therefore important to understand the hopes and expectations that customers have when they want to buy your product or services. What emotions does your customer expect to get out of it? The driving force is crucial. Once you understand this aspect, you will also know how you can reach and surprise customers emotionally.
Target groups can be quite heterogeneous. That’s why creating a so-called buying persona, also known as an avatar, is a great help. This is a model customer that represents your ideal customer.
Build a relationship
To delight customers means to start with building a relationship. The automotive industry is a good example of this. Many companies turn the collection of a new car into a special ceremony with the handover of keys and photos, for example at Mercedes, in the BMW World or in the VW Autostadt.
Customer events are celebrated there, and memories are created that customers love to think back on. Friendly reminders of service or MOT appointments strengthen the customer relationship afterwards and make sure that customers feel valued and cared for.
Arouse emotions
Which joy is the greatest joy? That’s right, anticipation. One emotion that can be evoked independently of the product is the anticipation of unpacking.
Apple, for example, has a whole department dedicated solely to the unboxing experience. Anyone who has ever unpacked an iPhone knows what I’m talking about. That positive experience when you lift the lid of the box and, as if by magic, the box opens very slowly – for me, a prime example of a magic moment because Apple knows that this is when the anticipation is at its greatest. The only thing missing is a dry ice fog. There are no limits to your ideas here.
Communicate in a solution-oriented way – know your customers’ expectations
Show that you understand your customers. Communicate from their perspective, take their problems seriously and prove that your products provide solutions. Promote the solution, not your product. Content marketing combined with storytelling should be a key element in the set of your marketing strategies.
Offer individualized customer experiences
Customers want to be perceived and treated as people, not as numbers. In online marketing, however, a personal salutation in an email newsletter is not enough. Specific information and messages tailored to the customer are much more helpful. Customers can be sorted into small groups that allows to provide them with personalized recommendations by filtering data. Surprise gifts, personal birthday greetings or a handwritten thank you note are further ideas for treating customers individually. Integrating a personal touch enriches any kind of loyalty program.
In sports and the cultural sector, there are further examples: footballers visit their fan clubs, artists give autograph sessions. In the business world, at trade fairs and roadshows, experiences can also be created that achieve a similar value, for example with celebrities as brand advocates or with customer events that offer insights behind the scenes of your business. A great example of this is pasta maker Barilla and its collaboration with Roger Federer, which has allowed the company to spread a customized customer experience virally across the internet.
Create premium offers
You should let your best customers feel that you see VIPs in them. This can be done with a loyalty program such as an elite customer club (e.g. as with airlines), limited special editions (does not work in every industry) or free extra services. Such customer delight examples could be reduced shipping costs, combine shipping with surprise gifts or an extended warranty.
Offer design options
Another option to delight your customers is to involve them in the product design process. In B2C, you could run surveys on your website or on social media asking what features your customers would like to see in the next product upgrade.
In the B2B sector, you can organize workshops to collect your customers’ wishes. Take your customer feedback seriously and also explain to them why you may not be able to implement some of their wishes.
Top customers as testimonials
Do you have experts, celebrities or well-known companies among your customers? Try to get them to serve as testimonials. Authentic and credible references are convincing and help to delight other customers.
Deliver high-quality service
The best way to see whether you can delight customers is to provide them with a great service. This includes that your customer service team provides, first and foremost, competent advice.
Here are some tips:
- Meet your customers at eye level and with attention.
- Impress them with content and expertise.
- Be transparent when something doesn’t work.
- Respond promptly to customer inquiries and be available.
Why is customer delight often forgotten?
To achieve customer delight can be a laborious task. In day-to-day business, other things are often more important. Furthermore, there is a lack of good KPIs to measure customer delight and distinguish it from customer satisfaction. As a result, many companies prefer to stick with the latter and fail to recognize the advantages of true customer delight, just sticking to satisfied customers.
Customer delight is worthwhile
Here is a brief summary of the advantages why you should delight your customers:
- Increase your brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing and recommendations
- Increased tolerance level when things don’t go as planned
- Increase customer loyalty: Fans will suffer with you and are less likely to go to the competition
- Grow your business because enthusiastic customers are willing to pay higher prices
- Increased opportunities for recruiting employees: Companies that have fans are perceived as good employers.
Customer delight requires stamina
You have to stay on the ball to delight your customers in the long term.
It’s like in sports: you need to train consistently to achieve peak performance. In this context, training is synonymous with relationship management, and customer delight is the peak performance that is reflected in your business figures as a positive reaction.
What are your plans for inspiring customers?
Have you already tried some of the ideas presented here? What strategies have you used so far to offer customers a special experience? In my keynote on the Fan Principle – How to turn your customers into fans, you will get direct impulses that have already benefited large companies such as Mercedes and Allianz. We also regularly find individual solutions for how your company can benefit from new ideas in customer enthusiasm. Please feel free to send an email to [email protected] or go directly to the contact form.
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