Transforming Customer Satisfaction into Customer Delight — The Art of Giving more than what’s asked for

Customer is the hero!

This mantra is often chanted in the marketing world. And to that extent, it is the duty of every business to make their customers feel like a real hero!

Traditionally, businesses use marketing and sales campaigns to attract the customer and provide them with certain benefits so as to lure them into converting to a user of their product.

However, today, customers understand the intent behind these campaigns and you can use these only once to draw them to your business. But for creating customer loyalty, you would have to surpass your own efforts.

According to Invespcro, it is 5 times more costly to attract new customers than retaining an existing one. Thus, it is prudent to invest in generating a truly vivid Customer Experience that converts the usual customer satisfaction into customer delight and thereby customer loyalty!

What is meant by Customer Delight?

Customer Delight is a step ahead of Customer Satisfaction. Delighting customers is about creating unexpected positive experiences for your customers that connect with them at an emotional level. As per Microsoft’s survey, about 54% of customers expect greater customer experiences today than a year ago.

For delivering customer delight, you as a business must focus on your customer as a human more than as a prospect for the sale of your product. The human aspect of selling will help you focus on the deepest insights of your customer, targeting which will help you satisfy them beyond happiness.

Customer Delight thus refers to the activities and efforts undertaken by you to exceed the expectations of your customers derived from your brand.

This ultimately results in long term connection, customer retention, and great word of mouth.

It’s important to understand that Customer delight is more than just surpassing customer satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction is about merely meeting the expectations of the customer from your product/service where as Customer Delight ideas are about meeting customer’s expected as well as latent needs.

Value Proposition Of Customer Delight

The major reason why Customer Delight is important for any business is because it results in customer retention. And customer retention can help increase profits.A study by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company suggests that an increase of 5% in customer retention can increase profits by up to 25%.

Customer delight helps in retaining customers in the following ways:

• Repeated Sales: Delighting customers results in an experience beyond satisfaction. And a customer will always be willing to pay for that kind of experience again.
  According to Forbes, 73% of customers assert that a good customer experience is the key to their brand loyalties. Thus, moving from customer satisfaction to customer delight helps in generating repeated sales.
• Word of Mouth: A happy customer becomes an advocate for your brand. Imagine what a delighted customer would do! Turning customer satisfaction into customer delight results in a great word of mouth.
  As per a study by Deloitte, on an average, customers are likely to recommend a brand to 9 more people if they have a positive experience with the brand. Thus, customer delight ideas can be a brilliant way to trigger positive reviews.
• Greater Market Share: According to Zendesk, positive reviews about a brand influence 90% of customers while making a buying decision. This means delivering customer delight can achieve greater market share by attracting prospective buyers.
• Competitive Edge: Customer Delight is becoming a new means of competitive advantage. From its study, Gartner estimates that around 89% of businesses are likely to compete upon customer experience. And in such a scenario, focusing on converting customer satisfaction into customer delight can provide your organization with an edge above the others.
• Long term success: With repeated sales, more market share, and an edge over the competition, moving from customer satisfaction to customer delight can benefit you in the long run.

Providing your customers with value beyond what they need always reaches to their hearts and minds. This is why customer delight is important for your business. So without further adieu, let’s discuss how you can turn customer satisfaction into customer delight.

Moving from Customer Satisfaction to Customer Delight: The Journey!

Now that you know why Customer Delight is important, it is evident that you might be looking for Customer Delight ideas. For creating customer delight, all you need is to be observant and focus on the following areas:

• Better Understanding Problem: Customer Delight is derived from customer satisfaction. So, first and foremost, you need to build Customer Satisfaction. Customers mainly struggle in explaining what they really want.
  So if you understand what your customer needs, you can be their go-to brand. Feel the pain of the customer and develop a solution to relieve it. Only then will they realize how becoming your customer benefits them. This develops trust and your prospects know that you understand them!
• Effortless Customer Assistance: At times customers may feel lost with your product. There may be doubts or complaints that require assistance. The customer delight formula to be used here is to be timely and responsive.
  Do not keep your customers hanging. Rather, let them know that you have looked into the matter and are working on it. You can also provide them with resources like videos, demos, whitepapers, etc to educate them on your product and reduce uncertainty.
• Proactive and Reactive Customer Feedback: It’s important for customers to feel they are being heard. It may not be possible to fulfill all their demands, but you should lend them ears. Acknowledge their suggestions and welcome their efforts.
  This helps them know that they are valued and converts Customer Satisfaction into Customer Delight. In fact, according to Oracle, 63% of CX professionals trust in customer feedback as a means to improve Customer Experience.
• Keep in Touch: Don’t forget your customers after the sales are done. Instead, keep in touch on a regular basis. Talk to your customers on special occasions, give them favors for being an existing customer, inform them about new offers in advance, wish them on birthdays and anniversaries, etc. This customer delight idea is very effective in turning customer satisfaction into customer delight.
• Prize Them Or Surprise Them : Moving from customer satisfaction to customer delight requires you to think out of the box. Go out of the way to create gestures that increase customer satisfaction index. Surprise and delight ideas like discount coupons as a birthday gift, or offering free snacks, or enrolling them in lucky draws, etc. can turn customer satisfaction into customer delight.

Introducing Customer Delight Index

The customer delight steps as mentioned above can help you in moving from customer satisfaction to customer delight. However, you would want to measure the impact of this change.

Conversion of customer satisfaction into customer delight is not easy. And you need to quantify your goals for customer delight in order to achieve better results.

The most feasible way to achieve this is by using customer satisfaction surveys to create a customer satisfaction index. The only difference here would be to use questions that target more aspects of customer delight.

We can actually achieve this simply by introducing “Criticality Index” for all the primary experience components of the customer satisfaction.

For Example — if a brand has received following ratings on primary experience components of Price, Product and Delivery from their customers out of a scale of 5.

The customer satisfaction is a simple average of customer satisfaction rating — 3.2 in this case.

However customer delight index will incorporate the “criticality index” of each of experience components ie. Price, Product & Delivery.

This criticality index(CI) gives an indication that this experience component is more important to customers — the higher the CI, more important is this for customers. Incorporating the CI into customer satisfaction ratings — now you have customer delight rating which gives a much accurate indication of how customers felt.

The customer delight index will be then the simple average of customer delight rating — 3.4

If we look at customer satisfaction and customer delight side-by-side — we can see that based on how customers have rated us for Price, Product and Delivery — the delight rating could be higher or lower than overall customer satisfaction rating. This difference is called Customer Delight Differential which is an indicator of perceived and actual customer experience.

While it may take more efforts, catering to the human aspect of sales will help you succeed in the long run. A happy customer may recall your brand but a customer who is made to feel special will remember your service forever. Using customer delight ideas to convert customer satisfaction into customer delight will help you increase brand loyalty and rule the market!

And measuring customer delight can help you take a step ahead of your competitors and dominate them entirely. Want to see how it’s done in detail - then you must surely check this awesome piece on Brewing Customer Delight Index to dig deep and experience the sweet sensation of delight yourselves.

Hope the maths applied sweetens the experience of your customers as well!

Happy Reading!!!