How To Deliver A Meaningful Customer Experience & Delight Your Audience
- Customer delight is the practice of consistently exceeding customer expectations so customers associate your brand with a positive experience.
- Customer satisfaction means meeting expectations; customer delight means exceeding them, and you must satisfy customers before you can delight them.
- Four low-cost ways to delight customers are timely responses, random acts of kindness, personalized offers and useful content.
- Customer delight is a company-wide job that involves IT, delivery and support teams as well as marketing and sales.
- According to OutboundEngine, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one, which makes delighting current customers a sound investment.
To deliver a meaningful customer experience, meet your customers' expectations every time, then go past them in ways they notice. That extra step is customer delight. It rarely needs a big budget: fast and caring answers, small acts of kindness, personalized offers and useful content do most of the work.
Customers desire excellent service and great quality products. That motivation is as old as time. What has changed is how easily customers can choose where to spend their money. Thanks to the internet, the choice of where you shop has never been greater. To compete, retailers must provide a great customer experience. If they can't offer service as good as their competitors', they risk losing their customers. The most successful companies go the extra mile and try to delight them.
This article is the practical side of customer experience. For the definition and the building blocks, read what digital customer experience is. To find the moments that matter along the way, start with a customer journey map.
What is customer delight?
You might be scratching your head at the concept of customer delight. But I'm quite sure that in your everyday life, you've met businesses that have delighted you. It might be the pizza place around the corner that always adds an extra slice or a free soda to your order. It might be the small craft store where you got a keychain with your name engraved on it. Or it could be your internet provider, with a customer service desk that answers right away.
Customer delight is not complicated. It covers the IT team that builds and maintains your website, the people who deliver products to customers' doorsteps, and the contact center agents who deal with customer complaints. In other words, customer delight should run in your company's DNA.
It also makes financial sense. OutboundEngine notes that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. Putting customer delight at the center of your business model helps you keep your current customers and increase their customer lifetime value. It also makes new customers easier to attract, because word of mouth spreads easily. If your customers are delighted, they will tell others.
What is the difference between customer delight and customer satisfaction?
At first glance, customer satisfaction and customer delight sound similar. Both involve making the customer happy with your business. The difference is where they stop.
| Aspect | Customer satisfaction | Customer delight |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Meet expectations | Exceed expectations |
| What the customer gets | Their money's worth, on-time delivery in good condition, reasonable support | More than they paid for: faster help, faster delivery, an extra layer of bubble wrap, a small extra that goes with the product |
| How the customer feels | Happy with the purchase | Surprised and appreciated |
| What the customer does next | Does not necessarily recommend you | Buys again, stays loyal and is likely to recommend you |
| How to read it | The minimum you must deliver every time | What you build on top, once satisfaction is reliable |
Don't get me wrong. Customer satisfaction and customer delight are not mutually exclusive. Before you delight your customers, you need to satisfy them. And here is the real challenge: if your customers are already used to a high standard of service, it takes more to surpass it. Imagine how they'll react once you do.
What are low-cost ways to delight your customers?
The idea of an omnichannel customer experience is to provide a consistent level of service across the customer journey. That journey might begin with a customer reading a blog post on your website and end with the product they bought arriving at their doorstep on time.
Providing an exceptional omnichannel experience is difficult. Here are four things you can do to improve your company's customer experience and reach customer delight.
1. Respond to inquiries on time
Have you ever looked for something on Amazon, messaged a seller and not received a reply? Nothing stops us from looking for another option when a seller doesn't respond.
Responding quickly to customer inquiries can help increase sales and improve your reputation. You cannot stay online 24/7 to answer every message, but you can use a chatbot on your website or social media page to answer common questions. As a customer, I want to know that my question is taken seriously. Even from a chatbot, a well-crafted message tells customers their questions will be answered.
But the hustle doesn't end there. Answering the question is the real deal. Setting up a chatbot is easy. Actually caring about each query and responding to it takes patience, and it matters. My own experience with WPX Hosting showed me how prompt, knowledgeable answers from customer service representatives turn into customer delight. The reward is the loyalty of happy customers.
2. Offer random acts of kindness
If you've ever gotten a free cookie with your latte at your local coffee shop, you've seen the value of random kindness. Here's a little secret: the barista probably gave you that cookie because they knew little things improve customer loyalty. Kindness is a quality people remember.
There are many ways to show kindness:
- Surprise customers with free delivery one day, or give them cashback for the delivery amount.
- Include coupons from local businesses in your package, such as a free coffee at a nearby café.
- Send handwritten thank-you notes. They are a nice touch, especially when unexpected.
- Send a birthday or anniversary email. Set up recurring emails once and they go out automatically on each customer's special day. Spice things up with a special discount.
And that brings us to the next point.
3. Provide personalized offers
Your customers are bombarded with generic content all the time. If you want your emails to get noticed, they need to be memorable. Using customers' names in your subject lines is a good start. But if you keep promoting products that are not relevant to them, you risk losing them to competitors.
Instead of sending generic emails every day, send personalized offers. Take your cue from purchase history and from the pages and products customers view on your site. A few ideas:
- Abandoned carts. Look hard at items people put in the cart but never bought. A simple email saying "We want to clear your cart. Here's 10% off" can move the purchase forward.
- Wishlists. If your store has a wishlist feature, it can be real gold. Look at what people add and never buy, then make their wish come true with a discount at the right time.
- Customer segments. Your most loyal customers, first-time buyers and customers who are drifting away need different offers. A segmentation such as RFM shows you who is who.
Personalized offers signal that you care about your customers' preferences and are willing to do what it takes to delight them.
4. Use content
Besides personalized offers, you can do much more with emails. Send useful content that adds value to the products your customers bought. If you've taken up fishing and bought some equipment, you would appreciate a brand sharing tips about the best fishing spots in your area, or simply how to improve your chances of catching a fish.
Many brands share customer experiences on social media, too. They repost customers' pictures with the product. The eyewear brand Lenskart, for example, tagged a customer and shared his photo on its Instagram profile. The customer was probably delighted by the exposure, and it cost the brand nothing.
How do you make customer delight part of your business?
I could suggest a thousand ways to delight your customers, but they will be ineffective as long as your business doesn't adopt a customer delight attitude. Here are five tips to make customer delight part of your business identity.
1. Listen to the customers' voice
Trying to delight customers can feel a lot like flying blind. You won't know what delights them unless you ask what they like and what they don't. Remember, the aim is for customers to be delighted with your business, not the other way around. Build customer feedback into your strategy through surveys, reviews and support conversations, and the result will be a truly delightful experience for everyone who comes into contact with your business. Our comparison of NPS, CSAT and CES helps you pick the right survey.
2. Be flexible but coherent
Customer experience is in constant flux. What works now might not work tomorrow. Hardly anyone predicted how much the COVID-19 pandemic would change the way we do business, for example. Printed discount coupons became less practical, and online discounts took their place.
Always look for something that adds a benefit to the customer experience. If something is not working, drop or adapt the idea and try a new one. Evolve your practices, but keep them consistent with who your brand is.
3. Try to be innovative
If you provide the same things as your competitors, you may lose out to whoever offers the lowest price. To become your customers' first choice, give them something different.
An unexpected present is a sure way to impress customers. You can link gifts to how much a customer spends with you. Banks and large institutions have long rewarded their most loyal, high-value customers this way. You can do the same on a smaller scale.
4. Enable engagement with your brand
Customers no longer expect one-way communication from brands. Social media gives companies new ways to engage with customers: contests and quizzes, raffles, and featuring customer-submitted content on your site, with permission. When fans see their content on your site, they share it with their circle. It's a nice way to engage with your audience, and it can result in customer delight.
Building this kind of social proof takes time, but it is worth it for engagement and sales. A single platform for managing your eCommerce videos and other customer content can save much of that time.
5. Treat your staff like you treat your customers
Employees who are treated well at work are more likely to engage positively with your customers. Many customers also care about working conditions at the businesses they buy from, and that affects their purchasing choices.
Building a customer delight culture could include weekly meetings where you celebrate team members who went the extra mile for a customer. This reinforces the idea that when employees make customers happy, their leaders reward them.
Where should you start with customer delight?
The ideas above work best as a routine, not a one-off campaign. Use this sequence to put them into practice:
- Fix the basics first. Check delivery times, product quality and support response times. Delight built on top of a broken experience does not last.
- Map the journey. Use a customer journey map to find the touchpoints where customers feel uncertain, wait, or finish a milestone. Those are your delight moments.
- Ask customers what they value. Run short surveys and read reviews and support tickets. Look for what customers praise and what frustrates them.
- Segment your customers. Your best customers, new buyers and customers who are drifting away need different gestures. Nexus by Omniconvert groups customers by RFM into Soulmates, Loyal, New, Promising, About-to-Dump and Breakups.
- Choose a few gestures per segment. Pick from the four low-cost ways above: a thank-you note, a relevant offer, a helpful piece of content, a faster answer.
- Measure and adapt. Track repeat purchases, feedback scores and referrals by segment. Keep the gestures that move them, and replace the ones that don't.
| Customer segment (Nexus RFM) | What they need | Delight gesture to try |
|---|---|---|
| Soulmates | Recognition for being your highest-value, most loyal customers | A surprise gift, early access or a handwritten thank-you note |
| Loyal | A reason to keep buying regularly | Personalized offers based on purchase history |
| New | A great first experience that leads to a second order | Helpful content about the product they just bought |
| Promising | Encouragement to build a habit | A relevant offer on items from their cart or wishlist |
| About-to-Dump | Proof that you still care, before they leave | A fast personal check-in and a question about what went wrong |
| Breakups | A good reason to come back | A feedback request, then a win-back offer based on the answer |
Nexus also reads NPS by segment and pushes RFM segments directly to Klaviyo, Meta Ads and Google Ads, so a delight campaign can reach exactly the customers it is meant for. See how Customer Intelligence in Nexus works.
Frequently asked questions about customer delight
Customer delight is the practice of consistently exceeding customer expectations, so that customers associate your brand with a positive experience. It goes beyond giving customers their money's worth. It surprises them with more than they paid for, such as faster help, a thoughtful extra in the package or an offer that fits them.
Customer satisfaction means you meet expectations: the product works, it arrives on time and support is reasonable. Customer delight means you exceed them. Satisfied customers are happy with a purchase but do not necessarily recommend you. Delighted customers are more likely to buy again and recommend you to others. You need to satisfy customers before you can delight them.
A delightful customer experience is a set of positive, memorable interactions with a brand across the whole customer journey. It meets the basic expectations first, then adds moments of surprise that go beyond what the customer needed or asked for.
Delighted customers are more likely to stay loyal, buy again, try more of your products and refer other people. That raises customer lifetime value, helps you stand out from competitors and improves how people see your brand. Keeping customers also costs less than replacing them: OutboundEngine notes that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one.
Most delight comes from attention, not money. Answer questions quickly, add a handwritten thank-you note, send a birthday email with a small discount, remind shoppers about items left in the cart or wishlist, share content that helps customers use what they bought, and feature customer photos on your social channels.
Personalized offers show customers that you pay attention to what they want. Base them on purchase history, the pages and products a customer views, and items left in the cart or wishlist. A relevant offer at the right time feels like a favor. A generic promotion feels like noise.
Feedback tells you what your customers actually value and what frustrates them, so you do not have to guess. Ask through surveys, reviews and support conversations, act on what you learn, and ask again. Without feedback, delight efforts can feel like flying blind.
Understand customer needs, personalize the experience, make the customer journey seamless, offer proactive customer service, engage your employees, and collect feedback continuously. Then match your efforts to customer segments: your most loyal customers, new buyers and at-risk customers each need a different gesture.
Delighting your customers should be a cornerstone of your business strategy. Without a customer-centric business model, your brand risks losing customers to competitors who are ready to go the extra mile. Try new things that make customers say “Wow!”, stay flexible, stay open to feedback, and your business will keep customers coming back for more.
Know which customers to delight first
Nexus by Omniconvert segments your customers by RFM into Soulmates, Loyal, New, Promising, About-to-Dump and Breakups, and reads NPS by segment, so you can match each delight effort to the customers who need it.