17 Ways to Surprise and Delight Your Customers

What is customer delight?

The one thing that is common among the most successful small businesses is they all strive to create great customer experiences at every touchpoint of the brand

Many even surprise their customers with free gifts & bonuses with the aim of making them feel special and exclusive.

Great customer experiences are the result of proper planning and implementation or execution of practices and processes that are customer-friendly and customer-centric. Great customer experiences don’t just happen with great products or services alone.

Thus, customers are delighted with the brand when their expectations are consistently exceeded.

Customer delight, therefore, is the highest level of customer satisfaction that can be achieved.

Great customer service leads to great customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to great customer experiences which in turn leads to customer delight.

Customer delight therefore in the new brand for business success.

What is the importance of customer delight?

The importance of customer delight for every small business to thrive can never be overemphasized, in the context of today’s competitive marketplace.

Customer delight is the goal for any business aspiring to grow and scale.

Customer delight can help boost brand loyalty among customers when used effectively.

Customer delight is crucial for every small business for generating social proof (high ratings as well as positive reviews online) and especially for customer retention.

While customer delight is crucial for every small business to grow and scale, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to creating great customer experiences.

Achieving customer delight consistently could serve as a catalyst for business growth.

The positive experiences that are created when the customer expectations are exceeded, could help significantly improve brand loyalty.

When customers are delighted with their experiences with the brand, it is easier to aggregate social proof in the form of ratings and reviews online, which in turn could greatly help potential customers while making their purchase decisions.

Because the customer experiences are unique to your business strategy, your brand, and your knowledge of your customers, that can be a true differentiator and also among the hardest things for any competitor to copy

Business strategy, brand, and customer experience – that you could delight and amaze your customers.

Following is a list of ideas that could help you with delivering customer delight in ways that could help you stand out.

Even doing just one of these exceedingly well, could significantly help in catapulting you to a whole new level.

 17 (Seventeen) Ways to Surprise and Delight Your Customers

1. Understanding Customer Needs and Expectations

By doing research on customer interactions online, you can easily determine what they want and how they want it – and give it to them.

That way your acceptance as a brand will be much better

2. Know Your Customers’ Top Issues

By gathering information from multiple sources such as surveys, employees, reviews, social, call centers, etc., you can determine the top issues your customers have. Make your own “Top 10 List” and take active steps to resolve them.

3. Being consistent across channels

Customers expect consistently excellent experiences across a diverse set of channels. And when the experience isn’t consistent from one channel to the next, it feels broken.

4. Deliver Beyond Customer Expectations –

This requires knowing what customer expectations are in the first place. But even the little things (like a free video view from Amazon) can put a smile on your customer’s face, making the experience that much better

5. Your Customers Value What You Offer

As a practice, ask yourselves continually as to why customers should do business with you over the competition.

What problems do you solve, or goals do you help them achieve?

What’s truly unique about your product or service?

Why does this matter to your customers?

Validate your unique differentiator periodically and its relevance to your customers.

6. Focus on the Experiences That Matter Most to Customers

Focus on improving experiences that matter the most to your customers. By determining the degree of dissatisfaction or loyalty relating to specific aspects or experiences, you can focus better prioritize spending and resource allocation accordingly.

7. Help Your Customers Achieve Their Goals

Fit what you offer to their needs and create experiences and offerings that align with the goals they’re trying to accomplish, instead of trying to push your agenda, products, or services.

8. Educate Your Customers

Helping customers better understand you and your products or services transforms buyers into promoters. Also, helps them get immediate and often greater value from their interactions.

9. If You Screw Up, Own Up, Apologize, and Mean It

Small businesses are people too. Everyone makes mistakes. And sometimes, customers get annoyed.

And, a sincere apology can go a long way to help calm even the most upset. Provided, of course, you back that apology up with action and resolve the issue.

10. Make Your Customers Feel Valued

When customers believe their relationship with you matters, and that you recognize the contributions they make, loyalty and engagement follow. Focus on making customers feel valued.

11. Develop a reputation for speedy service

Every customer desires speedy service or swift action, regardless of the situation. The speed with which you reply to an issue or inquiry is a perceptual indicator of how much you care.

Something as simple as a quick acknowledgment that someone’s begun the process of resolving their issue might be all it takes.

12. Empower Your Employees

Happier employees mean happier customers. Empower your employees with the authority and the tools to improve customer experience, and watch employee (and customer) engagement soar.

13. Simplify All Customer Experiences

Simplifying all the experiences, communications, products, and services easier to understand not only increases the likelihood of customers meeting their goals and reduces problems, but it also benefits the bottom line.

Simplification could also be applied to the internal processes and systems that support experience, for better effectiveness and adoption.

14. Mobile First approach works very effectively

More than desktops or laptops, customers primarily engage with/on their smartphones.

Customers increasingly demand anytime, anywhere access across channels, journeys, and devices.

Therefore don’t lose sight of this overall effective and powerful channel – the mobile for cross/multi/omni-channel goal.

15. Personalize Interactions / Personalization Across Channels and Touchpoints

We’re talking about serving a world in which you can better serve your members by giving them exactly what they want and need, when and how they want it.

Through a deep understanding of “each” rather than just “all” customers, you provide unique benefits your competition cannot match.

16. Deliver Beyond Customer Expectations

Once you know what customer expectations are in the first place, put a smile on your customers’ faces, making the experience that much better.

But even the little things if they are thoughtful can put a smile on your customer’s face, making the experience that much better.

17. Listen to Your Customers

Listen to what your customers are saying about their experiences with your brand. Use tools such as NPS, CSAT, and similar tools to find out where you stand against the most critical success factors so that you can take steps to drive improvement across engagement, purchase, loyalty, or product quality.

Conclusion

As a small business, what you could do to delight your customers has varied meanings for different companies and, of course, customers.?

It’s interesting that research shows “80% of businesses believe they provide excellent customer service, but only 8% of customers think so.”

You want your customers to know, that you did everything you could possibly do, to take care of them.

A great tool to use for maintaining customer relationships is the customer relationship management (CRM) software. The best CRM solutions help record and log all emails and other forms of communication, as well as set up reminders to check in with customers who are having specific issues.

You must design an unexpectedly satisfying customer experience to delight your customers.

And that takes time, effort, resources, and most importantly, your undying commitment as a small business owner, to ensuring that your customers are delighted.

Hope that helps. If you found value in the above, please share your thoughts and comments below.

Until next time,

Happy Smarketing.