Great customer experiences do not happen by chance. They require planning and mindful delivery. And there’s no single approach that can address all the needs of this customer experience.
Organizations that delight customers on a regular basis have a nearly 80% advantage over customer experience laggards. The different experiences that customers get with an organization can be its unique selling point. Take the example of Zappos, which built a brand on the back of extremely good customer service. People pay more for a better experience as much as they are willing to pay more for better quality.
Customer delight – the definition
Helping customers have a positive experience with the brand can be called customer delight, and it involves going beyond what is necessary to ensure customer expectations are met. By delighting customers, organizations can establish an emotional bond with them.
The importance of customer delight
Customer delight is not just meeting the needs of the customer – but the act of going the extra mile to help customers experience a positive emotion that they didn’t expect. The act of delighting customers consistently builds authentic relationships and can be done in multiple ways. Customers who have had positive experiences with the brand will look for more, and even promote the product or solution among friends and families. Exceptional customer service encourages customers to stay loyal and reduces the customer churn rate significantly. When customers come back, their trust in the brand makes them spend more – because they know they’ll get positive experiences. These return visits over time accumulate, as high-end customer service is an investment that increases the customer’s lifetime value.
Strategies for customer delight
Top-notch customer service coupled with proactive support shows that the organization values the time of its clients. By knowing the customers’ expectations and offering the best solution, organizations can create strategies to retain their existing customers, delight them, and convert them into brand ambassadors.
Provide real-time support
Having customers wait to get help is one of the most egregious steps a company can take, and a survey by American Express supports it: 13 minutes is the maximum amount of time customers are willing to wait, and even that is high. Deploying new technology to provide real-time support is the way to go, with tools like live chat. 79% customers prefer live chat due to the immediacy it offers.
Enhancing support features with tools that simplify customer reporting issues is also a great way to extend quick resolutions. A tool like Screenjar helps support team members review recordings of customer issues, which can be done by very little effort from the customer’s side. The app creates a Jira ticket of the issue with the recording, so that relevant teams can get immediate info on what needs to be remediated.
Deliver omni-channel service consistently
Customers shift across multiple channels to reach out to businesses or make a purchase, and the behavior has changed drastically since 2020. 98% of Americans switch between devices multiple times in a day. While the customers shift from one device to another, they expect the experience to be consistent. If not, they get frustrated and may switch to another brand. Going omnichannel is the only way for businesses to make sure that the service is consistent across all the channels – be it website, social media, app, in-store, or something else. This can be done by using tools that simplify customer interactions, like Roadmap portal for Jira service management which creates a compelling product roadmap by capturing customer feedback and feature requests better. It helps in aligning teams to build better products.
Delight customers through support channels
Organizations can empower their support teams to take independent decisions so that customers end up happy. Managers can supervise team members and help them identify and act on opportunities to deliver excellent service in the beginning and let the team members decide after a specified period. Employees that have the authority to handle customer queries independently go the extra mile to help customers, and report higher job satisfaction. In addition to improvements in motivation, customer service and morale also see an uptick – impacting the quality, productivity, and decision-making processes positively.
Analyze customer feedback
Customer feedback provides an insight into what works well and what can be done to improve the experience but asking for it is a difficult task. More questions and the customer might get irritated, fewer questions and the organization may not have enough actionable information. That’s why ask for feedback at the right time, like at the end of the live chat conversation, a successful checkout, or a support ticket resolution. To further simplify matters, teams can create customized feedback questionnaires using something like Typeform, making surveys feel less like interrogations to customers, and more like having conversations with them.
Feedback gives an insight into customer needs and frustrations. But in order for feedback to be effective, it needs to reach the right team members at the right time – and that’s where feedback management solutions come in handy. They help categorize all feedback so that different departments can get to the issues that pertain to them quickly. Identifying the nature of the feedback helps in classifying tickets into feature requests (positive) and bug fixes/improvements (negative). Handling both on merit will ensure customers that the organization is invested in the future of the product – and increase their involvement. By proactively informing the customer about the resolution of the ticket, organizations can improve customer loyalty too. A good feedback system helps teams understand the needs, expectations, and issues faced by customers, and organizations can align their services to match the changing requirements of the market.
Communicate on a personal front
The power of personalization is evident in the digital-first world. What was once the domain of elites, can now be offered to the masses, at scale, without having to alter much of the structure. A survey by Epsilon shows that 80% of customers prefer to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
Keeping a tone that matches customer personality is important while personalizing communication. Preferences for short and longer communication and interaction style must be considered, and it can happen by listening to customers and asking about their preferences – which personalizes the experience and builds their confidence in the brand. Enabling authentic conversations, and gestures like sending follow-up messages after purchases or sharing relevant offers if required, helps customers to consider or refer the organization to their close ones.
Build a community
Not every community has to be a Facebook, and having close-knit groups dedicated to a specific interest can help customers understand the product or service better. These communities can be ad hoc too, where customers can interact with the team, ask for help, provide suggestions, request for features and more.
Final thoughts on customer delight
Customer service has an impact on long-term buying behavior because for every customer who recommends the product to family and friends there might be someone who has a negative experience. To be on the right side of the customer service divide, leaders should plan to impress and delight customers in the immediate future and find ways to extend it in a holistic way.
