How to Delight Your Customers

A 10% increase in customer retention levels results in a 30% increase in the value of the company. That stat alone highlights the importance of investing time and effort in delighting your customers.

What is customer delight?

Customer delight is often confused with customer satisfaction.  But there is one major difference between the two. Customer delight is about going the extra mile beyond just customer satisfaction to make customers feel extra appreciated. However, at the same time, you can’t separate customer delight from providing good customer service. For example, you may send out gift vouchers to your users to delight them, but if they get poor customer service every time they contact you, they are not likely to continue doing business with you. So, customer delight should go hand-in-hand with customer service to create returning and loyal customers.

Four different ways to delight your customers

In relationships, you always try to find different ways in which you can surprise the other person or make them smile. It’s the same when it comes to delighting customers too. Below, we list some of the strategies you can use to deliver customer delight.

Surprise and delight

Humans love being surprised. In fact, being surprised by something good amplifies positive feelings up to 400%. For example, one company sent out special thank you gift hampers to customers who volunteered to help test the beta version of a new product. This gift showed appreciation for their time and was an unexpected bonus to the customers.

Find small ways to say thank you to your customers, even when they least expect it. Just a thank you note can change your customer’s opinion of you for the better.

Help customers succeed

Delight your customers by going above and beyond in your efforts to help them succeed. Automattic, the makers of WordPress, has recently delighted teachers by investing in the success of online education.

The pandemic has changed the way teachers work. Education institutes have switched to online classes where possible, and a significant number of teachers are switching to online mode for the first time.  When Automattic saw that more and more teachers were contacting them to set up their websites so that they can deliver their online classes, they created free webinars to help them get started. They did this in addition to providing customer service to help them discover the potential of WordPress and use that to their advantage.

Listen to (and act on!) customer feedback

Asking customers what they think makes them feel valued. Listening to their feedback and acting on it will delight them, especially if you take the time to follow-up with them.

While there are plenty of tools and ways to collect feedback from the users, the key is to listen and act on that feedback. It is important that when you collect the feedback it is shared with different stakeholders like Marketing, Sales, and the Product team. If this feedback is not funneled through to them, there will always be a disconnect between the customer and the rest of the company. This one-way road will result in customers feeling like they are not being heard or paid attention to.

Empower your customer support team

Your support team can deliver an excellent customer experience only when they have all the tools available to them. A good helpdesk product that provides the team with context about the customer along with their conversation history is a must-have. You don’t want the users to need to repeat their information every time they contact you. Empowering your customer support team to answer questions quickly and accurately will delight your customers.

It’s also important that agents have the ability to follow up on customer conversations that require further action. Using productivity tools like Trello, Asana, etc can help agents quickly make note of tasks that they need to follow up on later. For example, if they have a bug to file from their previous conversation, they can just drop the link to finish this later without having to think about it when helping the next user. This makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, thereby enabling customer delight!

How to deliver customer delight

Each business or industry will have different means to delight their customers. For example, a flower vendor may be able to surprise and delight their customers by sending them a bouquet on their anniversary, while a SaaS business that may surprise customers by giving a free month subscription to their product. Here are some of the ways on how you can deliver that delight to your customers in your own, unique way.

Offer support through multi-channels

Rarely will a business have users solely from one particular generation or demographic. But we know that each generation has their favorite tools for communication. To cater to all of your unique customers, it’s important to offer omnichannel support. You don’t want to force users to email you when they prefer to connect over the phone. When you cut down the customer’s effort to get in touch with you, that’s already one step towards delighting them.

Follow up with customers when they don’t expect it

Have you ever experienced that joy when you get a random message from a friend or family member you haven’t heard from in a long time? Following up with customers after resolving their reported bugs or implementing a feature request leads to the same joy. This goes a long way in delighting them. It shows that you care about them.

It’s not just about following up after fixing bugs either. You can also create the same type of delight by sending a thank you email or card when they’ve been with your business for a year. It’s all about showing the customer that you appreciate them.

Quick turnaround time

Working out a way to provide quick turnaround time to your users is one of the many ways to add to their delight. According to Convince and Convert, only 52% of businesses respond to emails within 24 hours. If you can beat that response time, you’ll impress your customers!

When it comes to estimated response time, underpromise and overdeliver with an autoresponder that sets expectations for the wait time. Then, beat those expectations by replying even faster. Efficiency tools like TextExpander can come in handy by saving you time when replying, leading to lightning fast responses. Being able to get your problem resolved before the expected wait time is pure joy.

Delight your customers

Delighting your customers can work wonders for your business. It should be part of your company’s creed and an area of focus and discussion when making decisions.

Create your own list of things you can do to delight your most contributing and engaging customers. What’s your favorite customer delight story? Share with us in the comments below!

Need more ideas on delighting your users? Check out these 31 tips to drive efficiency and make your customers smile.