What is customer enchantment?
Covering customers' needs means making sure they're satisfied. To exceed their expectations is to delight them.
More often than not, enchantment in a company is the result of chance. It's based on the personality of an employee who surprises the customer by going beyond his or her expectations: providing a service that goes beyond what the employee is supposed to do, creating a high-quality relationship, giving attention, making special gestures such as offering a gift...
It is in these situations, experienced as exceptional, that the relationship goes beyond the transactional register and activates the emotional register.
Enchantment shouldn't happen by chance, but should be created in a thoughtful, systematic and reliable way. This means identifying the activities in the company that will bring delight and generate profits.
Emotion as a positive marker of the customer experience
As the "Wow" effect explicitly describes, positive emotional branding enables customers to remember their experience for a long time, and thus prolong their loyalty. So pay particular attention to the first and last impressions left in the customer journey.
Enchantment as a prescription driver
Customers are more and more attentive to feedback from their peers, and as part of their choice process, they have taken to studying the opinions and comments of other customers on social networks, forums and comparison sites. And because a satisfied customer doesn't share his feedback as easily as a dissatisfied one, one of the challenges is to make customers "very satisfied" and therefore prescribers, so that recommendations and positive buzz are the order of the day.
Is enchantment profitable?
Surprising customers by exceeding their expectations is far more costly for a company than simply meeting their basic expectations. Indeed, this often requires greater availability from employees, for longer, more personalized exchanges. But it's interesting to assess the cost of enchantment not only in terms of loyalty gains, but also in terms of recommendation rates and positive word-of-mouth generated. When customers advertise free of charge to prospects, they save effort!
Enchantment as the final stage of the Satisfaction rocket
Beware, however: we can only enchant customers when we've already satisfied them with regard to their basic needs, which they (rightly) take for granted. Customer satisfaction is a prerequisite for enchantment. So there's no point in focusing your energies on enchantment if essential needs aren't covered!
In short, a company that is serious about improving the customer experience is committed to covering its customers' needs to the point of even exceeding their expectations, in order to create positive emotional branding. As a result, it will be much easier to win and retain customers, and its business development will be less dependent on the effectiveness of its "hard" prospecting actions.
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