Delight
Keeping your customers delighted; delighted to experience your product or service and delighted to share their experience with others. This is the essential task for every business.
How will you attract more people, connect with them more rapidly, build stronger engagement with them, extend their attention, and enhance your revenue? In our always connected world where distracted is our normal state of being, with the flick of a finger your boring messaging will disappear and be replaced with something else trying to capture your customer’s attention.
Flick, flick, flick…
Whatever your business, you’d better be thinking about providing customer delight and it better be powerful and catch their attention immediately. Or they will start flicking.
Flick, flick, flick…
To paraphrase Jacob Smith, co-founder of Packet, the new buyer isn’t looking for a detailed value proposition but an exceptional experience completely aligned with their tastes. And it’s non-negotiable.
Two things need to be combined to capture people’s attention…and lead them into becoming great customers. The first is brand activation: building a brand’s image in ways that strongly connect to your ideal customers…and prospects. The second is, as Smith says, providing an exceptional brand experience totally aligned with their interests.
You need to connect in ways that not only lead to your customers’ ongoing engagement but also causes them to become proselytizers via personal connections, social media, and other ways they have for spreading the delightful message about their engagement with you.
But grabbing prospects’ attention isn’t enough to turn them into not just customers but fully-engaged customers spreading the word about how wonderful you are. That is achieved only if you follow through on your enticements—if you always provide an exceptional, and yes, delightful, experience. Always.
You and your ideal customers are on a journey together. A journey you design to ensure that at every point along the way your customers receive the best possible service and experience. You never stop delighting them.
To design the perfect journey that always delights start by figuring out who your ideal customers are. The customers who reverse the delight equation. The customers who delight you. Those who lead you to think “I wish all my customers were like her.”
Then re-think your entire operation in order to focus on ensuring your ideal customers receive the experience they want and expect…always. Build great service into everything you do. Build the customer journey so that they are delighted at every step. Build consistency, reduce hassle, remove pain points.
Ensure everything you do exemplifies and delivers the experience you promise.
Never rest on your accomplishments. A journey is an ongoing process. Work constantly to grow and deepen the experience. Gather customer ideas, watch what’s going on around you, continually create, innovate, deepen and strengthen the engagement.
Keep your customers engaged, keep them spreading the word. Delight them…always.