Studies as far back as 1994 shows that companies that create delight for their clients enjoy disproportionate higher profits and client loyalty. They also often enjoy a greater proportion of their clients acting as good-will apostles of their business. That is, free positive word-of-mouth advertising.
This is the basic impetus behind Facebook with its vast and growing user base. In the Pre-Facebook world if you would delight one client they may tell their story to 10 other personal acquaintances. That’s great but today they will broadcast their experience (positive or negative) to their friend’s list, which contains an average of 125 people. It may then be resent to each of those people’s friends and interpolated the message directly reaches a possible 15,000± people. Oh, and by the way – it’s free. When’s the last time you directly contacted that many people with a simple over the top service action?
Showing Relationship Between Delight and Loyalty
So what exactly is delight and is there a formula you can teach your employees to use it. Well, I can give you an idea of delight; but unfortunately, unless you have the right people, it will never work for you. Can you train your people – yes, but unless they start with the proper attitude, you will be wasting your time, money, and eventually lose clients. Unless the process appears seamless and unscripted, the impact will be lessened, and its effectiveness negated.
Some concepts to delighting your clients:
- Delighting clients will improve your client retention, loyalty, and eventually your profitability. Perhaps surprisingly you may also be able to save on your advertising.
- You must maintain a certain satisfaction level with your products or services, thereby setting the standard for employees going beyond this base, and then delighting the client.
- Your employees must be trained to react quickly and decisively to correct any misstep. This also requires your giving the employees the power to correct problems without checking with their supervisors.
- Your competitors will determine both your clients’ level of satisfaction, and what will delight them. The restaurant up the block may always offer free desert, so if you do the same it has no potential for delight. Conversely, by constantly giving this, they just raise the client’s satisfaction level and remove any potential delight opportunity. If you do the same thing, it will become expected; thereby negative feelings will ensue when it’s not given.
- You must approach your clients as a long-term investment. Determine how much it costs to obtain a new client – then you can see the savings by just retaining to ones you have. Calculate their lifetime profit potential. A $5.00 a month checking account may morph into a credit card, and then a mortgage, for the bank that can delight a client.
- Finally, you must have a measuring system to determine what extra profits your delight “system” creates for your business. The concept has been proven by customer service stars such as Ritz-Carlton, Mercedes-Benz, Southwest Airlines, Commerce Bank, and Neiman-Marcus.
The basics of a customer service system built to delight clients:
- Build a database that can give you real-time information on each of your clients. Your employees must have easy access to this or memorize important details depending upon the size of your customer base. You need to know your best clients and their contribution to your profits.
- You must be specific and do something that has a personal direct impact with your client – i.e., don’t just give them dessert – use your database to have a personal decorated cake prepared when a client visits you on their birthday or other special occasion. Banks/Accountants can send birthday cards and automatically forward pertinent information for life-changing events – retirement, marriage, or children finishing college, etc.
- It should be playful and never boring. A bank manager can waive all charges one month for a client for no reason other than a “thank you.” Restaurant managers can comp the whole table for a good client in celebration of an alleged special event. Champagne is offered for a couple celebrating an engagement or anniversary. As long as it not for everybody – such as Friday’s banging and singing for a birthday for anyone who asks – and it relates directly to your client – your best customer’s secretary is at your venue for secretary’s day – for her, you can’t do enough.
- Make it disproportionate to the event. Visit your client with a catered lunch on the anniversary of their opening their Line of Credit, or give the hotel guest his favorite type pillow and have the room already set at 72 degrees he seems to like.
- Of course, it must be unexpected and somewhat arbitrary. Once you give a guest the pillow and set up his room you have raised the “bar” on his expectations. Those things must be done on each visit. Vary other things – give him free breakfast in his room one time, and tickets to a show another. The more unexpected the better – as long as you know someone’s likes/tastes. You waste your effort, money, and time if you give football tickets to a hockey fan.
- Basically, the more special, and exclusive, you make your effort to more impact it will make. This impact will translate to immediate “word-of-mouth” advertising both in person and on social-networking sites. It is human nature for clients to let everyone else know how special you think they are. They’re not bragging because you did it for them, they’re now signing your praises and by default making themselves feel great.
Here are a few examples from my personal experience to illustrate customer delight experiences:
- While in the restaurant/club business, you are given many opportunities to delight your guests. One time I observed a couple standing at the maître d’ desk, and the lady was crying. Apparently, they had just driven from 20 miles away to join us for their anniversary. The lady was sure she had left her iron plugged in (this was before the auto-off versions), and she must go home to unplug it. Rather than spoiling their celebration, I got her keys and drove to their house and unplugged the iron she had indeed left on. We also gave them a complimentary bottle of our best champagne to supplement the celebration. Five years later the husband became the CEO of a large brokerage firm and every party they gave was held at our restaurant. A short drive and a couple hundred dollars paid back a hundred fold. They also always celebrated their anniversary at our restaurant for the years I remained a principal in the venue.
- Another experience at another club involved one of my fantastic employees – Tascha. She overheard two ladies talking, after saving their money for several years to make this trip from Germany, they were having problems because they were not aware of the high costs in New York City. (Tascha spoke German, another way to delight clients – have multi-language speakers throughout your business) Tascha asked if she could something to help them out. I told her she knew better than to ask, do anything she thought appropriate. On the spot Tascha created a contest, grabbed the DJ’s mike and announced the ladies were the winners of the grand prize and had won a night at our venue free of charge. The crowd went wild, especially since no one else knew about our “contest.” Tascha offered to pay the bill herself, but I told her it wasn’t necessary. The outcome – for a simple couple hundred dollar check, which really only cost us 25% of that, we became the talk of the town. One of the ladies worked at a travel agency in Frankfurt (again when those were viable businesses) and sent everyone visiting New York to our club. The publicity was so overwhelming, and free, we instituted the “contest” as a regular weekly event. On different nights each week, one of the staff was charged with choosing one of their guests to win the free night. The club revenue went up 15% as everyone would come hoping it was the night for the freebie, and they would be chosen. Tascha was given an extra share of profit sharing that quarter, another “necessity” for successful customer service, but that I’ll leave for another article. This had all the elements of a perfect delight – arbitrary, unforeseen, not proportioned to the situation, directly relating to the customer’s experience, and fun.
- To show that conventional business situations also can fit customer service to delight, I can relate an experience I had when I owned a graphics/advertising agency. We were up for a large automotive account, and the decision maker was a definite company man, old-school, and had just arrived from Germany. After the initial meetings, he called and said he would like to get to know me personally since if chosen, we would be working together almost daily. We arranged to meet for lunch later in the week. I did some “research” and learned he was from Munich, Germany and had lived in the area all his life. He started working for BMW right out of school and had moved up in the ranks since then, and this was his first posting outside of Germany. I made reservations at an authentic Bavarian restaurant that I knew and found they also carried all the beers from the Munich area. After calling and suggesting we make it a late lunch, so we wouldn’t have to rush back I figured I was all set. One final thing occurred to me. I borrowed an old friend’s antique 1938 BMW 327 convertible. When I pulled in from of the office, all that could see came out to inspect the car. I went in and brought my potential client out and handed him the keys. As we pulled away the applause drowned the sweet sound of the tailpipe and my (now) client had a huge grin. The restaurant was only icing on the cake. The account was ours and over the next years we did many millions of dollars in business. One caveat, be careful how you do this type of delight, if not handled correctly it may appear to be bribery. With this though I showed a potential client my enthusiasm for the BMW brand (I actually did own a BMW, though not an antique), and also that I listen to what was important to him personally.
There are countless examples that will show that planning your customer service to delight clients will pay off; both financially and in satisfaction. Make it fun, make it personal, and do it with the best intentions, and you’ll never fail.
Advertisement
