How to Delight Your Customers (10 Thoughts)

Many businesses still consider customer service as a cost to be contained.  After all, Wall Street hasn’t yet adopted “happy bunnies” as a valid currency.  That is why the service conversation needs to shift from cost to profit, indicating the value of delighted customers to the business, and the cost of dissatisfied ones.  Doing this allows brands to calculate a rough ROI on their customer delight initiatives and measure after the fact whether they have made a – monetary – difference.  It’s always interesting to see how quickly the C-suite gets interested in customer delight when they see the profit of it.

And as you’ve got their attention, they will quickly see that while customer service can be contained to one department, customer delight is a job for the whole business.  This is the angle to get their support.  There is nothing more powerful than a senior executive taking up the cause of the customer, challenging the organisation to perform to delightful standards and putting customer delight metrics into everyone’s bonus plan.  If on top, they actually go out and set the example by delighting customers themselves, the brand is rocking. 

When confronted with a deluge of emails, quarterly reports, production meetings, staff reviews, etc. it is hard to focus on the customer.  After all, if it was easy, we’d all be doing it.  That is why every business should appoint internal customer champions who, similar to the green, black and other belts of Six Sigma, roam the company to spot opportunities for customer delight.  By understanding the customers better than anyone else, these people should acquire the personal authority to challenge anything that doesn’t make sense and coach their colleagues to deliver ever higher levels of delight.

Stating that every touchpoint should be a “point of delight” sounds good on PowerPoint, but remains too vague for action.  Brands need to define the meaning of delight for every individual in the business, so people know what is expected of them.  Not by implementing complex processes, measurements and standards, but by focusing on the desired end result, and letting people get on with it.  I never met anyone who got out of bed in the morning looking forward to “another day of upsetting customers”.  If you define it well, your people will get it right. 

I always marvel at the organisational ingenuity to avoid delighting a customer.  Processes stand in the way, systems aren’t ready, skills are lacking…  This leads to compromise and watered-down propositions like a (brand) initiative to “occasionally pleasantly surprise its customers”.  While I understand the reasons, the problem is that as a customer, I don’t like my wine to be watered down.  You either delight me, or you don’t.  Kinda sorta doesn’t cut it.  So every time you hear an internal compromise in the making, ask what the customer would think of it and if he wouldn’t like it … challenge it head on.  

Most organisations still ask product managers to manage, well … products.  Even with the best of personal intentions, PMs are given a limited customer mandate and are typically forced to reconcile their initiatives with the profitability of the product(s) they manage.  While sensible in a short-term P&L context, this is senseless when pursuing customer delight (which by definition transcends product or business silos).  Brands should broaden the PMs mandate to cover all of a customer’s needs and let them focus on building a long term customer relationship, not “push” product. 

Why do hotels organise check-ins the way they do?  Why do life insurances focus on your illness rather than your health?  Why does medicine for children taste bad?  We hate to admit it, but we do many of the things we do, simply because everyone seems to be doing them that way.  While some traditions make sense, many don’t and when challenging them, you often find they stand in the way of delighting the customer.  Creating delight is about breaking away from the pack, and simply doing something different, could be a good place to start. 

Now here’s a scary one.  How often do you see customers in your company?  And here I don’t mean market research or product (co-)creation.  I mean actually bring customers into your warehouse to explain what they love and hate about the way you ship their products.  Involve them in the recruitment of front line staff.  Come up with business models for products.  Trim organisational fat in those areas they don’t see adding value … Customers have a pretty good idea what they like and dislike when confronted with it.  Take advantage of that.  You might learn something 🙂 

As we are all customers ourselves, every one of us is a specialist in the area of customer delight.  We know – in our hearts – how things should be working, and we can see where business gets in the way.  I often find this position to be my strongest role.  Thinking from the customer perspective allows tuning out all of the corporate noise, and just focus on how things should be.  As a customer, I don’t care about your processes or constraints, I just want things the way I want them.  And as I’m the customer, that means I’m right.  Right?