What is Customer Delight?

We often use and hear this word right, “Customer delight is surprising a customer by exceeding their expectations and thus creating a positive emotional reaction”.  The customer gets delighted when you provide a customer experience that exceeds their expectations. Customer delight isn’t just providing basic service — it’s going the extra mile. 

Here the customer we are talking about is both internal and external customers to whom we provide services directly not only in the form of product, it’s all about supporting them to achieve the goals of the organization as well.

Why it is important?

Businesses have talked about customer satisfaction for a long time. But customer delight makes a bigger impression than mere satisfaction. It inspires an emotional connection with you and your business. That connection is an important part of a business breakthrough.

Customer delight vs customer satisfaction

In the past customer satisfaction has been seen as a key performance indicator. Customer satisfaction measures the extent to which the expectations of a customer are met. However after the pandemic, the situation is different, mere customer satisfaction is not sufficient and does not create business loyalty. Nor does it encourage positive word of mouth about an individual or the company. 

When you meet a customer’s expectations, you satisfy them. That’s a good thing. But because it’s what the customer expected, it’s not likely to cause them to become brand advocates or loyal return customers. Customers don’t expect a lot from brands. That creates an opportunity for your business to surprise them by going above and beyond. We call that customer delight. 

Who’s responsible for customer delight?

The immediate answer to this is the one who is directly interacting with customers but is this the right understanding? 

No, it is not at all right, they act as a face that’s all. They’re likely to interact with and be influenced by multiple departments. Their first impression might be of ads or content created by the marketing team. Then they talk to a sales rep and buy the product. Whether the customer likes the product depends on the product design team. When customer has an issue with their purchase, they contact customer service. Each of these touchpoints can make or break the customer experience. Customer delight is a collaborative effort between teams which many times we fail to understand and tend to ignore when results are not in our favor.

We’ve looked at what customer delight means. But what exactly is it that delights customers? To leave your customers with a great impression, we have to follow these principles: 

Understand your customer needs 

Know your typical customer. What are their pain points? How can your product or service help them? Once they make a purchase, what assistance might they need with the product? When you don’t understand customer needs, the customer will have a frustrating experience. For example, you might be trying to convince a prospect that your product is a trendy status symbol when they’re more concerned with affordability. To delight your customers, you have to understand what will resonate with them. 

Provide real solutions to customer problems

Customers have problems they need you to solve. You can create customer delight by anticipating those problems and offering solutions in advance. 

Make the customer experience as easy as possible

Anytime a customer interacts with you it should be a fast and painless process. Even small inconveniences — like being transferred between multiple customer support heads — can make a bad impression. 

Build trust with your customers

Customers can tell if you don’t have their best interests in mind. If you promise something you can’t deliver, they remember. If you can’t back up your claims with good reviews and testimonials, they notice. A customer who knows they can always trust you to be honest and transparent is a delighted customer. 

Improve the experience with digital tools

Achieving customer delight is easier than it sounds — you just need the right tools. Modern software solutions can help marketing, sales, sourcing, and customer service teams provide an outstanding customer experience. 

How to measure customer delight 

There’s no rule for how to measure customer delight. Many businesses create an internal customer delight index (CDI) based on the factors they think are important. Usually, this involves surveying & taking feedback from customers. Here are some more metrics you could use to measure customer delight. 

Customer Satisfaction

CSAT stands for customer satisfaction. Your CSAT score is the percentage of total customers who have a positive experience with you & your company. You can determine this by sending surveys to your customers, asking them to rank their satisfaction with you & your business, products, or customer service. 

Customer churn

Customer churn, also called customer attrition, is the loss of customers & unhappiness about you and your business. A high or rising customer churn rate is a hint that you have failed to delight your customer.

Customer delight is more than just a positive experience 

To delight your customers, you have to create a surprisingly positive customer experience. That’s a complex task involving multiple departments, lots of data, and customers at every stage of their journey. Luckily, in the modern era, you don’t have to do it all manually. The right automation platform will help you exceed customer expectations at every turn. I shall quote one example here to make the above summarised easily and understood well in terms of customer delight. 

Eg:- Retailer or brand reimburses the parking charges in a Mall to his customer while all others are not bothered on this point, though this value is small and nothing, this will create a wow feeling and it can delight your customer. 

Customer delight is the need of the hour for the individuals and the business to survive against the competition is my view, hope you agree with me. Are we ready to delight your customers? Hope you like this article, do share your feedback and comments. 

RELATED TOPICS:#Apparel,Ramesh Gunasekaran