Customer Satisfaction – Really Delight Your Customers

“Customer delight!” The phrase conjures up pictures of customers dancing in the aisles, clapping their hands with joy in celebration of the purchases they’ve just made.  But there really is such a commodity as customer delight and it’s increasingly gaining recognition as a desirable outcome of marketing, far beyond simple contentment with a product or service.

The idea of ‘delighting’ customers rather than just ‘servicing’ them is a versatile concept. To get some idea of its dimensions think of the difference between “service” and “delight” — one word is functional and impersonal, the other is warm, friendly and very personal. Because their attitudes reflect what they perceive as a personal (rather than commercial) relationship with a business, a delighted customer is much more valuable and loyal than one that’s simply satisfied with what they buy.

This means that customer delight is not just about having a product that performs up to or slightly better than the consumer’s expectations. A customer expects a certain standard of performance and will certainly be dissatisfied if it isn’t met. Products that outperform these expectations are more likely to be valued than those that don’t, but the customer is still not going to be “delighted” by this.

Customer delight is a response to a set of benefits beyond functionality, and beyond the brand of a product as well. Having said this, it must also be noted that customer delight is not a set of static benchmarks. If that were the case it would be simple enough to produce a high-quality product at a value price then market it with slight underpromises and achieve customer delight.

In contemporary marketing the real trick is to achieve customer delight through selling a premium-priced product or service, removing price as a differentiator and replacing it with other factors that reward and delight the purchaser.

Here are just three of the dozens of ways customer delight is now being created:

Customer Reward Programs

Programs that give customers incentives for purchasing can be big contributors to customer delight. They are beyond the customer’s satisfaction with their purchase and provide something extra that adds value to the experience.

Some of the rewards offered by these programs are: discounts for additional or frequent purchases, bonus products or services earned from purchases, and occasionally cash rebates on purchases.

Update Programs

When a customer makes a purchase of an item that is likely to be upgraded in future models — whether it’s a computer or a motor vehicle, this creates an opportunity to keep in touch and notify them of the upgrade, perhaps offering them a trade-in of their earlier purchase on the latest model.

Consumer research consistently shows that customers happy with an earlier purchase are favorably disposed to repurchase that product or brand. This type of update program is literally giving them a chance to do what they already want to do, and delighting them in the process.

Support Programs

Customers often need assistance, either with the purchases they’ve made or in shopping for replacement products for earlier purchases. Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly offering support systems to assist their customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Although the manufacturer/retailer sees this service as a means of retaining brand loyalty and directing future purchasing decisions, it is perceived by the customer as a big help and a bonus to their purchase — another source of delight.

Some companies have gone overboard in their quest for customer delight, trying to make mundane activities like commuter flights a “fun” event, or seeking to convince grocery shoppers that their trips to the supermarket can be exciting.

What these would-be “delighters” fail to understand is that customers don’t actually want to be actively “delighted”; the delight they may feel is the result of a total experience and is not something that can be contrived as easily as adding an artificial smile to the face of every salesperson in the store.

The key to achieving Customer Delight is to realize that it’s an occasional experience. Employees create it by going out of their way on the occasions when it’s required — not all the time. Retailers create it by providing customers with additional benefits and unexpected services that they can experience after the sale is made.

Some proponents of CRM software say that they can create “customer delight” in addition to the usual database and customer communications functions. It’s just not that easy.

To achieve customer delight begin by asking “What can be done to make every customer happier with my business?” and go from there. Give customers a good experience when they’re interacting with you and later, when they’re far away and not likely to be thinking of you at all.

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Copyright 2004, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com