A guide to enhancing user experience through customer delight

The origin of the word delight is a Latin word “delectare,” which essentially means, to charm.

However, in our digital world, it can be difficult to charm customers when many PMs are operating from similar strategies. Almost all digital products look and feel the same, and even the onboarding and checkout process seem familiar.

Is this good news for users (since they have an established behavior) or an opportunity to leverage something new? In this article, you’ll learn what customer delight is and how to leverage it to improve the success of your product.

What is customer delight?

PMs often use the words “customer delight” very loosely and fail to recognize that it isn’t an isolated moment, but a holistic experience. Imagine entering a store to buy a pair of shoes. As a customer, a delightful experience doesn’t just mean getting a good pair of shoes, but the entire shopping experience that leads to the purchase — the greeting, the display, the customer support with the alternate size options, the quick checkout, the loyalty points, and warm goodbye.

When you create an experience beyond the expectation of your customer, you kindle joy and delight.

This delivers more than a positive experience, it mirrors building an emotional bond which not only compels repeat engagement, but also encourages the customer to spread the word about your product.

The impact of customer delight on loyalty and advocacy

Every business plateaus. However, if you’re able to meet the toughest customer’s expectation, your team will not only have the capability/know-how to deal with this archetype, but you’ll also land a loyal customer who may additionally turn out to be your brand advocate. To get customers excited enough to tweet about you or to recommend you to family and friends you need to surpass expectations.

You can do this by adding that surprise element of providing them with discounts, perks, and benefits carved for this user archetype. This kind of referral or social media engagement is much more powerful than the dollars you would shell out for an ad campaign to have a similar impact, thus bringing down your CAC significantly.

If you can design an efficient loyalty-based referral program for your product, you gain a loyal advocacy program where you can aim to keep your loyalty codes/promo codes lower than your CAC.

How customer delight can make you stand-out

It doesn’t matter if you’re in B2B, B2C or B2B2C business; every product-based company has the task of being available to the customer at the time of their need. A lightning-fast response with a personal human touch rather than a matrix of questions to receive a semblance of response creates a marked difference in delighting your customers. If it is easy to reach you in comparison to your competitors, you’ve aced the expectations of your customer.

Offering genuine and guided personal interactions combined with quality and warmth creates a link with the customer/user which cannot be severed easily. These elements provide a solid step in creating the customer delight journey you want to offer your users. If you offer personalized offers, customer support, and curate the customer’s journey based on their interests, you have won them for the long-term.

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From my personal experience, I find Amazon customer care service to be an outstanding example of how a product can solve complicated customer problems. Its support allows users to seamlessly select the order they want to place a query about and then just request a call back (users can edit the phone number they want the call back on, whether it’s on the registered Amazon account or not) and then there’s almost always an immediate phone call from their customer care desk.

3 factors that contribute to a delightful customer experience

I have briefly touched upon multiple factors that contribute to a delightful customer experience. The three core pillars include:

1. Beat expectations — This is essentially the differentiating factor at every stage. For onboarding, this could be a new user promo code. For checkout, this could be a discount coupon with a timer
2. Be available — The post-purchase experience is key to any product experience. Build consumer trust to establish your brand’s availability beyond the initial purchase experience
3. Be consistent — I can’t stress this enough — being consistent in product experience is one of the highest drivers of consumer delight. Standardize processes to make product experience consistent from onboarding to checkout and from delivery to after-sales experience

Utilizing CRM for customer delight

You need to be able to find where your customers are leaving their footprints of delight, grievance or just pure interactions/engagements in their purchase journey. Customer relationship management (CRM) software plays a crucial role in managing interactions with customers and contributing to a delightful customer experience.

CRM helps build a repository for all customer data like purchase history, preferences, and interaction logs, including contact information giving a comprehensive view to businesses/brands. It allows the business/product to segment its customer community based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, and behavior patterns. It also collates user/customer information across various touchpoints, including sales, marketing, customer support, and service.

However, remember that CRM is just another tool. It’s a means to an end. Do not make it your only source of truth.

Fostering community for customer delight

Another way to build trust is to have your customers engaged in a community. Inbound methodology encourages the creation of a community where customers can share experiences and interact with the brand and each other. People trust other customers’ opinions, and they generally enjoy the feeling of belonging which is what a community of users/customers can foster.

Don’t just empower customers on a forum, maybe offer a reward for the customers/users who are most active on these forums. Your customers can interact with each other on these forums and that is of utmost importance because this interaction has the capability to inform your team. The product team can use this valuable information in customer research and sort through it by building user archetypes, identifying recurring user pain points, capturing bugs etc. that eventually adds value to the customer experience​​.

The role of feedback in customer delight

I had made a point earlier in the article about understanding the customer to show you care. The only sure shot way of understanding them is by gathering continuous and open feedback. You can use the following four steps to ensure you’re listening to your customers:

1. Ask — Build questions/forms or keep your platform open for users to give you feedback
2. Acknowledge — This is key. Your acknowledgement of receiving the feedback makes the user feel heard. Don’t underestimate the power of this
3. Analyze — Deep-dive into the user problem. Escalate if there’s a recurring pattern across multiple user voices
4. Act — Device a solution that caters to the problem statement and be iterative in this process. There’s no one-size solution. Keep gathering feedback and iterate

A lot many times products and companies gather feedback but fail to accept it or deploy useful changes based on feedback. Keep a close eye on what user input is being accepted or rejected, a scoring matrix to be objective is good however, add a subjective lens as well to ensure you are making the right efforts to enhance user experience.

Final thoughts

Ensuring that consumers are happy is essential to building enduring ties with them and propelling business development. By adopting a customer-centric strategy and surpassing expectations at each point of contact, you can provide unforgettable experiences that encourage advocacy and loyalty.

Remember, customer delight isn’t the destination but an omnipresent experience throughout the journey. It’s not just the wrapper — it’s the wrapper and the candy within.

Featured image source: IconScout

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