Customer delight, the new customer experience?
4 May 2022
Customer delight management, because being “simply” customer-oriented is not enough.
I almost fell off my chair when I heard this statement last week. Jokes aside, my conversation partner was firmly convinced that customer focus as a business strategy is outdated and that companies should instead concentrate on creating meaningful customer experiences.
I asked her how she had arrived at that conclusion. Simple, she said, customer-oriented working has long since become the norm within companies. So, to really distinguish yourself, you have to move up a notch, towards delight management. I swallowed nearly 100 reasons and practical examples to challenge her idea and realized that there are bound to be more people walking around with this vision. Perfect fodder for a solid blog post.
CX CD CI CC: what's in a name?
Following good Customerry practice, I like to start by explaining a number of concepts. After all, what exactly do all those customer-centric visions and strategies mean? Is there a distinction between customer experience, customer delight, or customer centricity? Or is it actually all a bit the same? Below, I share my interpretation of the following concepts.
Customer experience
To me, customer experience is every perception and emotion a customer experiences during all (direct & indirect) interactions with your company, throughout the entire customer journey and across all channels. That experience can be good, mediocre, bad, and just about everything in between.
Customer delight
There are many different interpretations of delighting customers. Some speak of frequently creating WOW moments, others of exceeding expectations to such an extent that you don't just get satisfied customers, but enthusiastic ambassadors / fans / believers... For me personally, it is a combination of both, with an explicit emphasis on regularly making customers WOW.
Customer intimacy
The concept of customer intimacy was launched in the 1990s by two communications experts, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. Their advice for strengthening companies' competitive position was: strive to be number one with your product (product leadership), your process (operational excellence), or with the personal attention you devote to customers (customer intimacy). It is about much more than good customer service; it is about building a long-term relationship of trust with customers. This starts with getting to know your customers. Listening, collecting data, and then responding to customer needs with your offering. Core idea: “engagement”.
Customer centricity
If customer intimacy is about listening to and learning from your customer to shape your offering in that way, then customer centricity is the strategic choice linked to it. To achieve “customer intimacy,” you must effectively choose to implement a customer-centric strategy. This means aligning your entire company with this. Think of processes, initiatives to build a customer-centric culture, etc.
So where is the difference?
You can see it. Despite the subtle differences in the terms above, they all essentially revolve around the same thing: the customer. One term comes more from a marketing perspective, and the other more from strategic thinking. The fact is that, if done correctly, they all have the same goal in mind: a better relationship between customer and organization. Moving on to our next question: is customer delight management the answer to this challenge?
Customer delight, a must for every organization?
No. Not every company needs to opt for a customer intimate approach. As far as I am concerned, not every organization should aspire to overwhelm the customer with WOW moments either. In fact, I strongly advise against doing so. Simply handing out gifts or experiences indiscriminately without scrutinizing your total customer experience will only lead to frustrations and/or expectations that you cannot continue to meet in the long run.
For me, customer delight and customer intimacy are part of something overarching: a solid and structural vision + action plan regarding customer experience. Why? Simple. If you blindly do only what the customer wants or asks (just to keep creating that WOW factor), you will very quickly cease to be customer-centric and instead become subservient to the customer. The same applies if you only work with what you learn from the customer.
Choose well-thought-out Customer Experience Management!
So what should you do? Work on your total customer experience using a structural approach. You want to engage in “experience management.” Naturally, this includes listening and learning (intimacy) and exceeding expectations (delighting). But it also involves making choices. Being or becoming customer-oriented does not exempt you from making strategic choices. Who are you as an organization? What values do you project? Who do you want to be, or can you be, for your customers? What can the customer effectively expect, do we meet those expectations time and again, and what do we do when things go wrong? What do you not do for customers?
You must be able to answer all the questions mentioned above based on your customer experience strategy. This implies that companies focusing on top product or operational excellence still need experience management. You may deliver the best products or services, but the customer will still have different expectations. To be and remain competitive, you will need to score 'good enough' on that point as well.
For companies that are 'already customer-oriented enough'.
I don't believe a word of it. There, I said it.
Show me all those companies that are 'already customer-oriented' enough and are ready for the so-called next step: customer delight.
Most companies I know barely have a CX manager, and if there is one, they usually have no team, hardly any budget, and report to the marketing or sales director. And no, a customer success manager in a scale-up doesn't count as a CX manager either.
But of course, it is not about the titles. The majority of companies do little or nothing with customer feedback and fail to establish a closed loop. Companies that regularly engage in dialogue with customers, share customer stories, and involve customers in the development of products or services are truly the minority. Just like organizations that have values whose employees both Know and Can translate into practice.
Many companies still fail to deliver frictionless service, provide timely and proper answers to customer inquiries, and (still) hide their phone numbers from the customer as well as possible. And although there is much talk about cross-functional collaboration and 'breaking down silos,' customer contact often remains limited to sales and after-sales.
Don't believe me? No problem. I am literally jumping for joy at the prospect of getting to know all those companies that actually do all of the above right. Then I won't have to use the Coolblues of this world as examples so often anymore.
My advice
Fix the basics! Look for real customer frustrations and resolve them. In the meantime, build your customer experience management: vision, values, strategy, and so on. Once you have all that in order, everyone is imbued with a customer-centric culture, and you have found a good way to capture and handle customer feedback, feel free to start thinking about what you can do to “delight” customers.
How do you measure customer focus?
Yes, but Sarah, how do you measure whether you are actually working in a customer-oriented way? Let's be honest, that's not so simple. A tip: take the Customerry self-test and I will provide you with a free initial analysis within 2 working days. Enjoy!
Want to know more about customer experience, customer delight, or the other Cs?
That's possible! In the free Customerry webinars covering the topics: 6 steps to a better customer experience, the truth about customer journey mapping, and the customer listening plan as the basis for your customer-centric approach.
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