The term ‘customer delight’ is used to describe a customer’s positive experience interacting and benefitting from a business, product and service, essential to ensure customers continue to employ your services or buy your products.
Customer delight is as important for maintaining current customers as it is for increasing customer onboarding rates. So why is customer delight so important, and how do you guarantee it? Read on to find out more.
What is customer delight?
Customer delight occurs by exceeding expectations for sales and service, creating a positive emotional reaction, and prompting the customer to stay loyal to your company or brand.
Creating customer delight can be achieved in many ways, including, but not limited to:
- The quality of the product or service
- The efficiency of delivery or service
- The personalization of the customer experience
- The treatment and care by frontline staff
- Using customer service tools
- Providing a positive overall customer experience
Customer delight is essential for effective business development as it creates positive word of mouth; still one of the most cost-effective, impactful ways to grow your business and brand reputation.
Below are four key ways you ensure customer delight for your clients with your business, product or service.
1. Provide reliable, real-time support
One of the best ways to achieve customer delight is ongoing quality support. With more of our business models being internet focused, 24/7 online support, like a chatbot, is one of the best ways you can ensure a positive customer experience.
While not all problems can be solved via this rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technology, it does filter out the customers with common issues. It also allows you to isolate and focus on complex customer problems that require more diplomacy, optimizing your customer delight on significant matters.
Some detractors have claimed it removes the human element from your customer interaction; however, marketing stats have shown that real-time chatbot support, at least outside of business hours, has measurable positive effects on customer delight.
AI is also getting better at remembering customer details and interactions, allowing these programs to tailor their solutions to known customers, which is one of the best ways to create delightful customer experiences across the retail value chain.
2. Personalize the experience
We just briefly touched on the personalization of products and services, which is, hands down, one of the best ways to ensure customer delight.
Personalized features like live chats on apps and websites, especially in customer-facing businesses, are one of the best tools available to resolve your customer issues and answer questions.
Email communications are another important tool that can be personalized by staff or by automation software to provide your customer and client with a more personal experience leading to heightened customer delight.
3. Happy staff create happy customers
Billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, Richard Branson, is quoted as saying, “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your business”, which are wise words if you wish to increase or maintain your customer delight.
Suppose you have a face-to-face B2B company, and you want your employees to perform optimally at their jobs while providing exemplary customer service. In that case, it is important to ensure your staff are happy, working symbiotically, and feel valued and part of a team with clear direction and strong leadership.
To get your staff to take care of your customers, you must take care of them. So ensure your team is working with reasonable expectations, under clear and respectful direction, while being encouraged to have fun with their jobs and develop personalized professional relationships with your customers-a guaranteed way to promote customer delight.
4. Create a branded community
People love to have an experience and be a part of something. Creating a brand community helps to create word of mouth. In addition, a brand community is more likely to share its needs in social media groups and business connection sites, providing you with valuable business development data.
Making your clients feel like part of the family always provides them customer delight and maintains their brand loyalty.
Get all the customer delight tools in one place
Freshlime creates technological tools that provide optimal client experiences that keep your customers returning by giving personalized, continuous interactions and greater brand exposure. Join thousands of businesses worldwide, head to www.FreshLime.com today, and ensure you provide outstanding customer experiences every day.
Guest Post Written by: Luke Carlino | Freelance copywriter, social media manager, and content creator.