What is customer delight?
Meeting customer needs means ensuring their satisfaction. Exceeding their expectations means ensuring they are delighted.
Most often, delighting customers is the result of chance in business. It relies on the personality of an employee who will surprise the customer by exceeding their expectations: providing a service that goes beyond what they are supposed to do, creating a high-quality relationship, having attention, special gestures such as offering a gift, etc.
It is in these situations, experienced as exceptional, that the relationship transcends the transactional level and activates the emotional level.
Enchantment should not be the result of chance but created in a thoughtful, systematic, and reliable way. This means that within the company, it is necessary to identify the activities that will bring enchantment and generate profits.
Emotion as a positive marker of the customer experience
As explicitly described by the "Wow" effect, a positive emotional connection allows a client to remember their experience in the long term, and thus extend their loyalty. Therefore, pay attention – in particular – to the first and last impressions left in the customer journey.
Delight as a driver for recommendation.
The client is increasingly attentive to feedback from their peers and has made it a habit in their selection process to study the opinions and comments of other clients on social networks, forums, and comparison sites. And because a satisfied client does not share their feedback as easily as a dissatisfied client, one of the challenges is to make their clients "very satisfied" and therefore advocates, so that recommendations and positive buzz are generated.
Is delight profitable?
Surprising customers by exceeding their expectations is much more costly for the company than simply meeting their basic needs. It often requires greater availability from employees, for longer and more personalized interactions. However, it is worth evaluating the cost of creating customer delight in relation not only to the gains in customer loyalty but also to the rate of recommendation and positive word-of-mouth generated. Customers advertise for free to prospects, which saves a lot of effort!
Delight as the final stage of the Satisfaction rocket.
However, you can only delight the customer when you already satisfy them in relation to their basic needs, which is considered (rightly so) as something owed to them. Customer satisfaction is a prerequisite for delight. Therefore, it is useless to focus your energy on delight if the essential needs are not covered!
In summary, a company that seriously works on improving the customer experience focuses on covering the needs of its customers to the point of exceeding their expectations in order to create a positive emotional connection. It will thus have the capacity to retain and acquire its customers much more easily, and the development of its business will be less dependent on the effectiveness of its "hard" prospecting actions.
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