Delighting your customers is far from simple.
Today’s customers are savvier than ever before. They have more options at their fingertips. And they’re less loyal than they once were. In this situation, delivering expected customer experiences will never be enough to increase or retain customer loyalty.
Let that sink in for a minute.
To retain and attract customers, you have to go way beyond what you might think is expected.
You need to delight them. You need to be better than your competitors. Hell, you need to provide a customer experience that’s equal, or better than any customer experience they’ve ever had, as the Godfather of CX, Shep Hyken mentioned in our recent Customer Experience eBook.
In today’s CX game, it’s only by doing so that you can create loyalty, and drive growth.
But as we all know, this is far from simple.
Great customer experience doesn’t just happen. It’s complex.
So what’s the first step we need to take to create these fundamentally better customer experiences?
The answer lies in one aspect that seems simple on the surface, but can often be more difficult in its truest sense: understanding your customers.
But before we get to the meat and drink of this piece, let me first answer a few questions you might be asking.
What is Customer Delight?
Customer delight is when you deliver customer experiences that go way beyond what customers expect from your brand. When they shop with you, sign up for your product, or contact you for answers to their pressing questions, they’re left with a warm gooey feeling and feel an instant emotional connection with your brand.
Customer delight really isn’t about providing solid customer service. It’s not even about going the extra mile. It’s CX that’s light years ahead. To delight your customers, you need to deliver experiences that create emotional connections, experiences that clearly show your brand cares and understands your customers.
Why is Customer Delight so important?
Because in today’s hyper-competitive market, failing to deliver experiences that delight risks your business losing customers to your competitors. If you’re not able to create emotional connections with your customers, they’re just not going to stick with you.
But more than this, it’s important for growth.
If you inspire emotional connections and leave customers with that warm gooey feeling, their average lifetime value will increase. According to a Motista study, delighted customers have a 306% higher lifetime value than customers that are merely satisfied.
Why? Because if you delight customers, they’re far more likely to come back to you again when seeking out other products or services. Or if you’re a subscription business, they’ll stick around for longer, and upgrade when you need them to.
Word of mouth also comes into play here. Customers are more likely to share their experiences with their social and professional circle when you delight them. A study by Salesforce showed that 72% of customers will share their good experiences with others.
Shockingly (or perhaps not so, when you think about it for a few seconds), customer delight means people will also pay more for your products.
This isn’t a personal hunch, Salesforce research shows us that 66% of customers are willing to pay extra for products from brands that deliver exceptional experiences. Separate research shows 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
So, to quickly sum up: achieving customer delight helps you keep your customers and stave off competition, it helps your business drive growth, and it means customers will pay more for what you offer. It’s a win-win game to focus on customer delight.
How to delight your customers in 2022
As discussed in the introduction, the key to achieving customer delight is truly understanding your customers.
Now you might be thinking: how can I understand my customers when I have millions of customers, all with different needs, and all with different expectations?
If you’re a tiny business, it’s possible. You might have the time to read through each individual piece of customer feedback. You may even have time to sift through every single customer support interaction – though even this feels slightly unlikely.
But when you’re a high-growth challenger brand like Monzo or Getir, or an established player like Tesco or John Lewis, you’re not going to have time to do this. Even with a team of experts on board. Because let’s be honest, we all know CX teams are understaffed at the best of times.
Even if you hire Howard Stephen Berg to your team, it’d be next-to-impossible (he’s the Guinness World Record holder for speed reading, if you’re wondering).
So what’s the solution for CX professionals who want to understand and delight their customers? Let’s find out.
Customer Feedback: the key to understanding your customers
We all know by now that listening to customer feedback is essential to guiding your decision-making when looking to create exceptional customer experiences.
After all, there’s nothing more powerful than hearing from your customers in their own words.
But we also know that gaining meaningful intelligence from thousands of pieces of customer feedback, from multiple channels, across the entire customer journey can be incredibly difficult.
More feedback does not always equal more intelligence
To uncover insights about what really matters to your customers and understand the root causes of positive/negative experiences, you either need to employ a huge team of customer experience and data specialists, or you need technology that can do it at scale.
Customer feedback can’t sit in siloes
You need to unify all sources of feedback so that Trustpilot reviews, App Store reviews, NPS surveys, etc. are all analysed together, speaking to and informing each other, and singing from the same hymn sheet. You need a more unified approach to achieve customer delight.
Customer sentiment is critically important, but it needs to be unbiased
You also need to look beyond WHAT customers are literally saying in words, and understand the sentiment and trends behind your thousands of different pieces of feedback, across all of your channels, throughout the entire customer journey. Because sentiment is important – it’s what gives words (and thus, your customer feedback), meaning.
But, as we all know, assessing sentiment can be as wildly divergent as a Rorschach inkblot.
One person can read a customer review and see one sentiment, and another to see the polar opposite. That’s just human nature.
So we need an unbiased, non-human way to analyse customer sentiment.
The impossible, made possible by Unified Customer Intelligence
Now, all of these points may be starting to sound like a letter to a CX fairy godmother. But it’s achievable if you use the right technology. That’s where Unified Customer Intelligence comes in.
Unified Customer Intelligence is what enables us to do everything we’ve just discussed.
By unifying all customer data from all feedback under one roof, a Unified Customer Intelligence like Chattermill not only creates a single source of truth but also, the artificial intelligence that underpins the platform unifies and analyses all of your unstructured customer data – importantly, this includes free-text responses – to provide actionable customer insights.
Insights that are ultimately led by what your customers really think and feel about your brand.
The result? Better decision making, better insight, better customer experiences, and more customer delight.
Ultimately, it’s only by taking this unified, intelligent approach to customer feedback that you can truly get to grips with delivering experiences that truly delight your customers.
And as we’ve learnt, delighting your customers is essential to good CX, and good growth.
Customer Support: the delightful CX treasure trove
As we discussed in our 2022 Customer Support Trends report, customer support is an often-overlooked source of insight for customer experience professionals.
There’s perhaps a good reason for that. Customer support interactions are at a much bigger scale, and much more complex.
While customer feedback usually amounts to tens, or hundreds of thousands of entries across a year, customer support interactions – whether they’re from emails, chatbots, or tools like Zendesk – more often than not amount to millions, if not tens of millions.
Finding insight from the messy web of customer support interactions
Finding intelligence amid this web of noise can be next-to-impossible, at least on the surface. But, as we probably know, there’s a truckload of value within customer support interactions if we can clear the cobwebs and start to see the sun.
Again, this is where Chattermill can help. Like with customer feedback, Chattermill’s AI is able to unify, analyse, and deliver meaningful insights, even from the most complex, challenging customer support data sets. And it can analyse data from almost any platform you use.
So, even if you have millions of customer support interactions every week, you’ll still be able to easily find the sentiment and meaning behind what customers are saying.
Ultimately, it’s this that can enable you to find out what’s working and what isn’t, and make changes that are your customers in their millions are telling you will delight them.
Your New Delightful Reality With Unified Customer Intelligence
With access to what your customers really think about your products, services, and customer experience, you can delight based on intelligence.
Unified, Integrated Intelligence
Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence platform captures all customer feedback and support interactions across all channels, integrating with any technology you use.
Unbiased Intelligence on What Your Customers Really Think
Chattermill captures customer sentiment as it is – using artificial intelligence, rather than humans – to provide Unified Customer Intelligence free from bias and assumptions.
More Delighted Customers
With Unified Customer Intelligence at your fingertips in one single platform, you have more time to focus on actively delighting your customers. More time=more delight.
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