Surprise and delight your customers

Customer delight is surprising a customer by exceeding their expectations and thus creating a positive emotional reaction.  

This emotional reaction leads to word of mouth.  

What is "surprise and delight"? 

The best surprise-and-delight moments--and those that generate affinity--are delivered to a person who is not expecting anything and without strings attached, “It should be viewed as a gift, and it must be something that has a perceived value.  

Why surprise and delight?  

When running a business, you can't afford to disappoint your customers. It's crucial to delight your customers because they can be your biggest advocates or loudest detractors. You want your customers to feel that they're important and you genuinely care about them post-transaction.  

Put thought into your surprise and delight moments  

Most surprising and delightful moments are usually the ones that are unplanned, not strategised ahead of time.  

Getting a free bottle of water in a hotel room isn’t a surprise and delight moment. Getting a hand-written welcome note with it is better. Getting a wine bottle opener because the hotel remembers you asked for one on your last visit – now that’s impressive.  

Surprising and delighting your customers doesn’t have to be expensive. All that’s needed is some empathy, creativity, and empowerment of your employees to do what’s right for the customer.  

How to surprise and delight? 

From handwritten notes to just-baked cookies, a simple gesture can go a long way toward shoring up customer loyalty in a competitive marketplace. Even just a quick phone call can do more to earn your customers’ long-term trust than any discount code – your customers will be both surprised and delighted. Toolkit#  

We need to go beyond meeting our customers' basic needs, a big smile, a warm welcome, clean and tidy environments, products and services that work – that is meeting the customers' basic needs – by doing that you are preventing complaints (which is great). But if you want your customers to develop confidence in you, build loyalty and retain them then you need to exceed their expectations (refer to customer expectations content)  

Think about your customers' emotional needs, what you need to do to reassure them and build their esteem in you – take action on these points and you will surprise and delight them.  

Emotionally connect with your customers  

To create the opportunity to surprise and delight even more, you need to get to know your customers, really get to know them. You can do this by creating an emotional connection and making deposits into your customers' emotional bank account. Toolkit#2  

We know service is a ‘feeling’ – it’s about meeting the emotional needs of every individual. Treat each customer as if they are the one and only.  

To turn customer service into a ‘wow’ customer experience with surprise and delight you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money…  

Emotional bank account  

You probably pay attention to your financial bank accounts—the deposits and withdrawals, the interest and maybe even the occasional penalty—but are you at risk of being overdrawn, or even bankrupt, in any of your emotional bank accounts?  

Stephen R. Covey, the author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, defines an emotional bank account as one's relationship with another. He explains the concept of an emotional bank account with a metaphor: “By proactively doing things that build trust in a relationship one makes ‘deposits.  

When it comes to our relationships, we engage in similar kinds of transactions—making deposits or withdrawals in what Covey calls the Emotional Bank Account. When the balance is high, so is the resulting level of trust. When the balance is low, trust plummets and relationships suffer.  

Emotionally connecting with your customers will build your emotional bank account by making deposits.  

Bear in mind if you don’t get the relationship right, you can also make withdrawals from the emotional bank account.  

Ways to Amaze and Delight (and Surprise) Your Customers  

We know great customer experience doesn’t just happen. It is planned, designed and mindfully delivered. That’s because there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to customer experience. There’s a reason that true differentiation on the experiences you deliver are among the hardest things for any competitor to copy – because your experience is unique to your business strategy, your brand and your knowledge of your customers.  

It’s at this intersection – business strategy, brand and customer experience – that you have the ability to delight and amaze your customers. To help your thinking as you move down this path. Below are some (of the hundreds of possible) tips to get you started – or help move you along – your path to delivering “customer delight” in ways that no competitor can match.  

1. Always Try to Do Better 

Walt Disney said, “Just do your best work – then try to trump it.” If you REALLY try to make experiences and interactions better for your customers, they’ll notice. And so, will you – as loyalty and engagement grow, too.  

2. Anticipate Customer Needs 

You almost certainly have access to the data that increasingly surrounds your customers and their interactions with you. Use it to better understand what they want and how they want it – and give it to them.  

3. Deliver Beyond Customer Expectations 

Of course, this requires knowing what customer expectations are in the first place. But even the little things (like a free homemade shortbread with coffee) can put a smile on your customers face, making the experience that much better.  

4. Be Consistent Across Channels 

Customers expect consistently excellent experiences across an increasingly diverse set of channels. And when the experience isn’t consistent from one channel to the next, it feels broken. By working to eliminate data and service silos, it’s easier to be consistent.  

5. Continually Ensure Your Customers Value What You Offer 

Make it a practice to ask yourselves why customers should do business with you over the competition. What’s truly unique about your product or service? Why does this matter to your customers? What problems do you solve, or goals do you help them achieve?  

6. Eliminate Dissatisfaction (So You Can Focus on Loyalty) 

Though there’s no real correlation between satisfaction and loyalty, the fact is you can’t create customer loyalty until you’ve been able to identify and eliminate customer dissatisfaction. So, understand the drivers of dissatisfaction, and eliminate or fix ‘em.  

7. Empathise with Customers 

Put another way, this means showing your customers you actually care, understanding them well beyond basic segmentation to support their emotional wants and needs through attitudes, actions, and words.  

8. Empower your Employees 

Bottom line is pretty simple – happier employees really do mean happier customers. Empower them with the authority and the tools to improve customer experience and watch employee (and customer) engagement soar.  

9. Focus on the Experiences That Matter Most to Customers 

Across the typical end-to-end customer journey, your customers have multiple interactions and experiences. By focusing on improving those that matter MOST to your customers (by determining the degree to which they drive dissatisfaction or loyalty), you can prioritize spend and better allocate resources.  

10. Know Your Customers Top Issues 

Gathering information from multiple sources (surveys, employees, social media feedback forms, conversations.), you can determine the top issues your customers have. Make your own “One List” with the top 10 and take active steps to resolve them.    

Learn from the best  

Disney is a world leader in creating surprise and delight – they are all about the magic.  

They ensure all their team know the customer goal and are given the tools to deliver, they say “When our cast members know their ultimate goal is to create happiness, they are empowered to create magical moments.” 

Ask yourself  

How can you Surprise, Delight and even Amaze your customers?  

"Surprise and Delight" marketing strategies work really well when done correctly because they serve a two-fold purpose, building brand loyalty and creating fans.  

Everyone likes to feel special and customers always want to feel that their pennies matter. Nothing says "I value you" better than when companies take the time to look for ways to personal surprise their customers.  

By giving just a little back, customers already in "like" with a brand are guaranteed to remain a repeated customer. Social media makes sharing customer satisfaction with how a company has spread-some-love quick and easy, but the results of that display have an invaluable effect on the brand.  

Follow: Disney Institute Blog

Read: Make Their Day: Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers by Marie Cross  

Watch: A Defining Time for Human Connection in Customer Service | TEDx Talk