Is it possible to truly delight customers?
If you haven’t yet read The Effortless Experience, it’s worth your time. Developed from the HBR article, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, it actually recommends that you should delight them. It’s just that “delight” doesn’t mean that you need to create impressive, wow, over the top experiences. (In fact, according to the authors, doing that can lead to elevated expectations that become impossible to achieve. After all, how often can you lovingly send a Teddy Bear around the world with a note from the Teddy Bear maker herself, and return it safely home to the arms of the waiting child who left it in the room? And what do you do for your next act?)
Delighting today’s customer means making their life easy, being efficient (or if you’re dealing with a socializer-type personality, being social – and knowing the difference), and creating an effortless buying experience.
Sales people today create true delight for their customers when they ask questions that are meaningful for the buyer and therefore can provide answers immediately, with a comprehensive, personalized, thoughtful proposal – or even an agreement – a few minutes later.
Customer Service reps create delight for their customers when they can provide a solution for the customer that seems fair and reasonable. And when that isn’t possible (delight does not require you to give away the store!), it means listening to the customer, explaining the possible solutions with a focus on what can happen instead of what cannot, eliminating transferring them, speaking to them authentically and without a script and helping the customer understand that your goal – your desire – is to provide them with the best possible solution.
Reservation Sales reps create delight when they ask insight-based questions to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, as respectfully as possible, so they can provide the best travel experience, and the best call experience, for the interested prospect.
Another good example is lending companies that opens up opportunities for people with negative credit to redeem themselves. Because loans for people with poor credit are available online, more individuals with financial problems are becoming more proactive towards fixing their credit rating by taking advantage of these services.
Can you truly delight your customers? Yes! Just move away from creating a “wow” selling experience to providing an easy buying experience. That’s true delight.
Power Sales Writing