Customer Delight — Understand, Define & Measure
Moving from customer satisfaction to delight is what must be the ultimate goal of a business while crafting customer experience. This is because a satisfied customer may or may not return again but a delightful customer not only comes back but brings in other customers too.
Customer delight depends on 2 primary things — what does customer value and how did we fair on it. Most of the current customer satisfaction ratings only take the later into account leading to the following cases -
- Generalized feedback for different experiences rendered
- No ability to understand the needs of different customer segments
- Poor actionability by different organization functions
- Prioritize the actions or budgets to improve customer experience
Hence, introducing the customer delight index helps in tackling both customer value and our performance as per the expectations of the customer.
Let us understand this with a simple example -
In this scenario — customers have rated all the 3 primary components(drivers) of experience the same as 3.3. Most of the organizations and brands — who only have visibility into these ratings will decide to focus on all three aspects or components of customer experience equally. Is that the right approach ?
We should understand that different components of customer experience have different impacts on the overall customer experience. Overall when customers make a buying decision and get fulfilled — the customer has different expectations from the brand on different parameters.
Even if we ignore personalization or personified needs for the time being, customers give different priorities to different aspects and it is important to understand, measure and account for that inherent prioritization when measuring customer delight.
What’s the right Approach?
The right way to go ahead is through calculating the Criticality Index(CI) for each of the experience components.
As mentioned above — identifying what is more critical to customers for perfect overall experience and how much is very important. In order to do that — we need to calculate the Criticality Index (CI) for every experience component i.e. Price, Product & Delivery.
The way to do that is to calculate how often and by how much the rating of the specific component impacts the overall rating. Higher and Frequent the impact — more critical the component is.
Let’s take Price for example.
Calculate the average satisfaction rating for customers who are happy with the price i.e. customers who have rated 4 or 5 on the price. In this case — it will be customer 2,3,4 and their average customer satisfaction rating will be 4.00.
A = Average Customer Satisfaction Rating For Customers Satisfied With Price = 4.00
Likewise calculate the average customer satisfaction rating for customers not happy with the price i.e. customer rated 3 or less on the price rating.
B = Average Customer Satisfaction Rating For Customers Not Satisfied With Price = 2.33
The Price Criticality Index(Price) can be calculated as A/B = 4.00 / 2.33 = 1.71
Similarly,
The Price Criticality Index(Product) = 4.50 / 2.50 = 1.80
The Price Criticality Index(Delivery) = 3.33 / 3.00 = 1.11
If you can follow the maths involved — the criticality index depends on the customer’s collective propensity to rate you higher if they have rated you higher in the component rating.
In simple terms — if more customers rate you higher when they rate you high in pricing — that means pricing is more critical to the customers.
For the layman — higher the CI more important it is for customers.
Let’s now Do the Math
Once we have identified which and how much each component is critical for the user, we will use the Criticality Index of these components to calculate the Customer Delight Index.
Add weighted component ratings to calculate weighted customer satisfaction rating and divide it with the sum of component rating to get the Customer Delight Index.
The calculated customer delight ratings is the true measure of customer delight which takes both the importance of the experience component (CI) and the customer rating on these parameters. Let’s look at the customer delight index in comparison with the overall customer satisfaction ratings which customer input as his overall satisfaction.
The 2 ratings give 2 different measures i.e. perceived and actual customer satisfaction. The actual customer satisfaction is the real indicator of customer delight (or pain).
For e.g. though the Customer 1 rated the overall rating as 1.0 but the actual rating based on other customers ratings and patterns is 2.1. The difference between 2 ratings is called Customer Delight Differential which indicates the difference between the actual and perceived customer satisfaction.
Companies often perceive that Customer Satisfaction Rating and Index is the real answer to all their problems and makes a strategy accordingly. But the perception is entirely wrong. Customer Delight rather than Satisfaction is what matters the most and this is what you should focus on!
Understand the importance of Transforming Customer Satisfaction into Customer Delight — The Art of Giving more than what’s asked for, and work on transforming your business strategy into a real gamechanger.
Happy Customer Delighting!!!
