Four Greatest Ideas for Delighting Your Customers
Idea 89: How to create a delighted customer
If you cannot smile do not open your shop today.
Chinese proverb
An organization needs good two-way communication with its hydra-headed environment: financial institutions, stakeholders, government, local society, the global community, to name but a few of its talking heads.
However, the importance for every kind of organization of creating a delighted customer – the direct or indirect purchaser of its products or services – can hardly be overstated.
A huge range of factors can contribute to customer satisfaction, but your customers, both consumers and other businesses, are likely to take into account:
- How well your product or service matches customer needs.
- The value for money you offer.
- Your efficiency and reliability in fulfilling orders.
- The professionalism, friendliness and expertise of your employees.
- How well you keep your customers informed.
- The after-sales service you provide.
Notice how good communication is essential at every point in the relationship of your business with its customers.
Do you know the commonest remark to appear in customer complaint emails throughout the world? Will you people ever listen? So, above all, listen to what customers have to say.
To communicate really well with your customers you and your organization must handle complaints as personally as possible, by a meeting or a phone call in preference to a letter or email.
The delighted customer
It is self-evident that your business needs customers if it is to survive. But if you wish to enjoy sustained business success, you need to create the satisfied customer. That is a feeling the customer has that your product or service has met their expectations.
Now let's take it a step further. Why not create the delighted customer? The delighted customer has a feeling much stronger than satisfaction or the ‘feel good’ factor. It is the feeling that the products or services in question, including the quality of the relationship, have exceeded their expectations, often by a great margin.
How do you achieve that result? By going the extra mile. That means making an extra effort to do more than is strictly asked or required. It looks a bit foolish – you won't find traffic jams on the extra mile. But there is wisdom in the generosity of spirit that the world calls folly.
There is, however, one almost inevitable reward of creating the delighted customer that I should like to remind you about. Customers have long memories. In their conversations for months to come the delighted customer will be spreading the word about your products and services, building your reputation for you. You will never find a better salesperson than word of mouth – and you don't even have to pay any wages!
Whether it's a coupon for a future discount, additional information on how to use the product or a genuine smile, people love to get more than they were expecting. And don't think that a gesture has to be large to be effective. The local art framer I sometimes use attaches a package of picture hangers to every picture he frames. A small thing, but his customers certainly notice and appreciate it. It is your generosity of spirit that counts, not the size of the gift.
Always give people more than they expect to get.
Idea 90: The art of building up goodwill
Common sense is not always common practice.
Modern proverb
Some people see their customers as things, an economic pawn or a statistic on a graph, rather than as persons. Wiser business leaders think differently. They see that the relationship between their business and its customers is the cornerstone of sustained success.
The very word customer implies an incipient relationship. Derived from custom, a habitual use or practice, a customer is someone who buys products or services from a shop or business, usually systematically or frequently. If they buy from you just once they are purchasers, not customers.
It is in your interest to build on that embryonic relationship. Turn it into one of positive goodwill and mutual loyalty, based on an established reputation both for quality and for service. Why? Let me hand you over to one who can answer your question with far more authority than I can: John Spedan Lewis. He founded the British department store and supermarket chain known today as the John Lewis Partnership, a group renowned for its customer service. Writing in 1917, he said:
If we rely upon our value alone we shall obtain considerable success. If to our value we add a constant and careful cultivation of all the other arts of building up and maintaining good will, we shall be vastly more formidable to our competitors and do a good deal better.
One of those arts or skills lies in obtaining, interpreting and acting on feedback from your customer base. For example, National Express, one of the UK's leading travel companies, invites passengers to send text messages to the company while riding on its buses. No one has a better idea of customer needs than your customers. Make sure that you are listening to them.
Exercise
List four ways of enabling customers in your field of business to give feedback.
Think of these ways as nets that will enable you to harvest customers' ideas and suggestions for improvements in both your products or services and also, equally importantly, your after-sales service
Quality in a product or service is not what you put into it but what the customer gets out of it.
Idea 91: How to respond to customer complaints
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest sources of learning.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft
You are bound to face situations in which things go wrong from a customer's point of view.
Don't be dismissive of your customer's problem, even if you're convinced you're not at fault. Often you will be dealing with a customer's perceptions and in their context they are as important as the facts of the case.
Although it sounds like a paradox, a customer with a complaint represents a genuine opportunity for your business:
- If you handle the complaint successfully, your customer is likely to prove more loyal in the future, as if nothing had gone wrong in the present.
- People willing to complain are rare – your complaining customer may be alerting you to a problem experienced by many others who silently took their custom elsewhere. Remember to thank them for doing you this favour.
Complaints should be dealt with courteously, sympathetically and above all swiftly. Sympathy or empathy is important because it shows that you understand and take into account the customer's disturbed feelings. Strike a positive note from the beginning.
Make sure that your business has an established procedure for dealing with customer complaints and that it is known to all your employees. At the very least it should involve:
- Listening sympathetically to establish the details of the complaint.
- Recording the details together with relevant material, such as a sales receipt or damaged goods.
- Offering rectification, whether by repair, replacement or refund.
- Appropriate follow-up action, such as a letter of apology or a phone call to make sure that the problem has been made good.
If you're proud of the way you solve problems and rectify errors – by offering no-questions refunds, for example – make sure that your customers know about it. Your excellence of dealing with customer problems is one more way to stay ahead of your competitors.
Always remember, however, that it is still more excellent not to create the problems or commit the mistakes in the first place. And you will find, too, that it is far more cost-effective!
The quality of your service depends on the quality of your people.
Idea 92: Don't make promises unless you keep them
Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
All human relationships – professional or personal – depend on trust. And it is truth that creates trust. Conversely, untruth in all its guises – dishonesty, lying, insincerity, deviousness, lack of integrity – erodes and eventually destroys trust between people.
A promise is a verbal or written engagement to do (or forbear to do) some specific act. If you don't do as you promise, then in the eyes of the other person you have placed yourself firmly and squarely in the untruth camp. How does that feel?
There is then a domino effect. Trust levels fall, and that in turn reduces the existing goodwill. As the relationship deteriorates, communication also breaks down. In frustration, the customer eventually takes their custom elsewhere. Dead promises, dead business.
Therefore don't make promises unless you will keep them. Not intend to keep them, will keep them. If you say ‘Your new bedroom furniture will be delivered on Tuesday’, make sure that it is. Otherwise, don't say it.
The same principle applies across the board, to deadlines or client appointments, for example. It also applies, of course, to your own internal market at work: never say to a colleague that you will do something and then not do it.
If you are ‘seriously let or hindered’ from keeping your promise, then communicate that fact to the customer without delay, together with reasons – not excuses.
Can I think of an example in the last six months when someone selling me a product or service did not honour the promise they made? When I remonstrated, did they make more promises, which they did not keep either?
How did I feel?
Would I do business with that company again?
Have I recommended them to my friends?
You will be judged by what you do, not what you say.
Follow-up test
- Have you become fully aware of the value of your time – and other people's time?
- Do you now know what you should be busy about – in a word, your business?
- Do you make sufficient amount of time for quiet thought and reflection?
- Are you able to say ‘no’ with firmness and politeness?
- Have you developed your skills of delegation?
- Do you avoid wasting other people's time by always doing what you commit yourself to doing?
- ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ How much of your time is that thief stealing from you?
Decision making
- Have you a clear idea of how your mind works?
- When making decisions or solving problems, do you make use of the frameworks in Part Four to guide you in the process of thinking?
- Can you sense problems in the making and act decisively to deal with them before they get out of hand?
- What is your record in judging people?
- In selecting and promoting individuals, which of the following statements characterize your approach?
- You can always pick a winner, and never consult anyone else or seek specialist advice.
- You go by first impressions. Even if you think you are wrong you usually return to these in the end.
- You take people decisions slowly. You like to consult others who know the person, often on a confidential basis. You do not trust your own first thought.
- You like to see a person in a variety of different situations before making up your mind. Track record is an important factor to you, more so than psychological tests and the like.
- You rarely choose a person on technical grounds alone, unless they are working on their own. You try to see them in the context of being a team leader or member, and judge whether they will get on well with the individuals in that group.
- How do you rate yourself as far as judgement in decision making is concerned?
- Good – Your decisions usually have the predicted results, you can foresee consequences and you are rarely surprised at outcomes. You are shrewd and discerning at all times.
- Average – Your predictions of consequences are accurate about half the time. Your common sense is often proved right.
- Weak – Poor judgement often mars your performance. You tend to guess too much what will result from a given decision, and are frequently wrong.
- Can you think of two individuals you know, a man and a woman, who show in their lives and business practical wisdom that rare combination of intelligence, experience and goodness?
Communication skills
- Do you believe in the central importance of good two-way communication in the context of working life?
- Before any formal communicative situation such as a presentation or a meeting, do you consider the five points of the Communication Star?
- Can you speak clearly, simply and concisely, and also do so with spirit and in a natural, unselfconscious way?
- Are your skills of preparing and planning consistently applied to interviews and meetings?
- Has anyone commented in the last six months that you are a good listener?
- Can you take constructive criticism in the right spirit and manner as well as giving it?
- In your organization are there clear if informal channels for downwards, upwards and lateral communication?
- Are these channels clogged up with weeds, or clear, fresh and in daily use?
- Which of the six principles of effective speaking is the one that you need to practise hardest?
- Do you always invest sufficient time in preparation well before you have to give a presentation?
- Have you visualized yourself delivering the presentation –the opening, the middle section, the conclusion, questions/ discussion and your final words of thanks?
- How far are you afflicted by the ‘disease’ of not listening?
- Can you identify instances when you have engaged in selective listening, avoided the technical or difficult, or criticized the speaker's delivery or visual aids?
- Do you listen for the speaker's emotional meaning as well as the subject matter?
- Do you have the moral courage to give constructive criticism to those who report to you? Do you have the skill and the tact needed to do it effectively?
- How would you judge whether or not a person has taken your advice?
- When receiving feedback from others, do you look for a pattern in their comments?
- Are you as good at giving justified praise and saying thank-you as you are at giving criticism and finding fault?
Delighting your customer
- Do you know the product or service you are offering your customers back to front? In other words, are you an expert in your field?
- What parts of your organization's vision or mission statement and supporting set of values relate specifically to the customer?
- ‘We say that we are customer centric but we aren't really – it is all lip service.’ Does that comment apply to your company:
- Wholly?
- Partially?
- Not at all?
- How well do you keep customers informed of any changes in the pipeline?
- Does your organization have a reputation for really listening to its customers?
- Do you regard complaining customers as opportunities to create new friends and to improve your business?
- Are you free – no, I mean really free – of the pernicious habit of making promises to customers that you have not the slightest intention of keeping, just to buy a little time?
- Are you always looking for ways, however small or incremental, in which to transform a satisfied customer into a delighted one?