Adding Delight to Your Customer Experience
Are you delightful?
No, not you personally. At least not necessarily. The thing you’re selling.
When I work with clients, we frequently encounter companies who are operationally strong but failing to delight their customers.
How do you know if your offering doesn’t delight?
- Your product isn’t flying off the shelves (at appropriate conversion rates of course)
- You’re not getting referrals...even if you ask for them
- Your external marketing efforts seem on target, but they aren’t attracting new buyers
What the heck is going on here?
Remember What Matters Most
One of our guiding principles is “Remember what matters most.” If you get these three things right, everything else eventually takes care of itself.
- That your customers absolutely love you
- That your people love working at your company
- That the business makes money
But if you’re missing one of these three? You’re in trouble, and you’re probably feeling it.
Companies get tripped up the most on #1: making sure your customers absolutely love you. And if your clients aren't delighted, you need to solve that problem ASAP.
Companies That Delight
Some of the world’s biggest, most ubiquitous brands also provide incredible customer experiences and inspire extreme loyalty. Coincidence?
Three of my favorites:
Disney. You already know how much I love the Mouse. There’s a reason a “Disney experience” is like no other—their fanatical attention to detail.
Starbucks. The coffee giant sells an estimated 28 million pumpkin spice lattes every year. This third-party report explicitly calls out “surprise and delight” as a key tenet of the Starbucks experience.
Apple. Even during a pandemic, Apple fans queue up for the chance to purchase the newest iPhone release. Apple may not be universally loved, but hey, nobody ever said delighting your audience and being a polarizing brand were mutually exclusive.
What Delighting Your Customers Can Do For You
Being an entrepreneur is hard enough even when you’re crushing it. But if the market is not graciously accepting what you’re selling, the challenges are exponentially greater.
I’ve been at this for 30 years, and from what I’ve seen, delighting your customers boils down to being at least a little bit obsessive—especially in the early stages of delegating and building out your team.
To be clear: I am not (necessarily) talking about sending every customer an extravagant gift bag. Nor am I implying you have to be perfect all the time (you won’t be).
What I’m talking about is consistently delivering a high-quality product, with the high-quality service to back it up.
Note: If you feel like you truly provide an amazing customer experience but just don’t have customers who love you, then you could have a different issue: product-market fit. If you think this is you, we can help.
Get this right, and you will LOVE running your business.
You’ll receive constant compliments about your offering or service—a terrible standard, but it’s true.
You’ll have high retention rates or high numbers of repeat clients.
You’ll frequently get referrals and start growing through word of mouth.
(Yes, I still stand by my statement that you can’t grow this way forever...but it still feels really good to get those leads that come in without any effort whatsoever.)
And once you get it right, this cycle of virtue starts to create a flywheel. Use your marketing to capture what customers love, and the market will absolutely love you too.
Ready to transform your customer experience and boost your conversions, retention, and bottom line? Set up a call with our consulting team to see how we can help.
