Renowned billionaire investor Warren Buffet has been quoted saying that customer delight is the most crucial factor for a business to succeed.
Customer delight refers to consistently providing an excellent experience for clients across their buying journey and exceeding customer expectations.
Thus, customer delight results from going above and beyond to provide an extra positive experience in the customer journey and ensure customer satisfaction.
A delighted customer would readily repurchase your product, improving customer retention and lifetime value. They can also recommend your brand to others in their network, leading to increased P2P recommendations. At the same time, a delightful experience reduces the risk of customer churn and helps you maintain a loyal customer.
If you’re a B2B, SaaS, or eCommerce company trying to perfect your inbound marketing strategy, you may wonder, “how exactly do I make my client delighted and exceed customer expectations?”
You can take several steps to delight customers, clients, or prospects and thus improve customer loyalty. Here are five ways to do so.
1. Create Meaningful Content
Your content strategy almost defines your entire inbound marketing strategy. Content is what attracts customers and moves them through your sales funnel. Creating meaningful content implies creating relevant content that answers the questions or addresses issues your clients need to know.
Take Venture smarter, for example. The brand has published several guides on how to form an LLC in each state. We also cover business topics, like this article about how to change the ownership percentage in a company. This effectively addresses readers’ concerns regarding each state’s rules and covers relevant topics for company owners.
Besides a pleasant user experience, customers may also appreciate valuable insights, especially after a product purchase. Providing a community forum where your audience can discuss and share ideas, complaints, and concerns is also a great way to get meaningful content ideas and gain actionable insights.
According to the HubSpot flywheel, the focus of the inbound experience is to engage people effectively and help them solve their problems and challenges. For content, this may mean several things, including:
- Offering both global and personalized solutions to customer problems.
- Offering the customer or client a smooth ride to their purchase, renewal, or even inquiry.
- Offering content that focuses on each part of the customer’s journey on the funnel or flywheel. The wrong content at the wrong time can lead to friction in the buyer’s journey.
Content marketing needs to be heavily interwoven into your buyer’s persona and specified for each stage of your buyer’s journey. A great way to map the customer content journey is through a content calendar.
Hootsuite – a social media content management company – is a market leader in content relevance. Hootsuite is extremely good at mapping out buyer personas and crafting its content strategy toward each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Hootsuite has mastered the art of providing a delightful customer experience through content relevance. Their products are linked to pillar pages, which are, in turn, linked to possible FAQ pages for queries that customers may have.
2. Offer Personalized Benefits
Personalization provides unique experiences and benefits tailored to each customer’s needs and preferences. Companies can do this by collecting data, for example, through online interactions. They can then leverage these unique data insights to craft a unique experience for their customers.
It is an excellent approach since this personalized experience makes the customer feel valued and generates human connections with your brand. That ultimately results in more than just customer satisfaction—customer delight.
In a more conventional sense, personalization may imply tailoring each customer’s gift, note, or interaction. Inclusive language is also a critical component of personalization. It helps ensure everyone feels respected and included in your conversations and communications.
However, for a B2B business, it’s a little more complex than that. For example, while you can send bulk emails to improve the efficiency of your marketing automation, you can further personalize such emails for hot leads.
Personalizing the experience requires you to tailor experiences to every customer’s needs/expectations, which starts with understanding customer behavior. This results in a seamless and memorable experience leading to customer delight.
Marketing automation is one way through which you can achieve this. For example, the client could receive a personalized email signed by a sales manager after submitting a “contact us” form. Or, they could receive a shoutout or “Hi-Five” on social media from your customer service team.
To further improve and keep track of the client conversation experience, you may also have customers fill out online surveys or chat with your online client team.
Vidyard is a brand that has almost perfected the art of personalization at each segment of the marketing funnel.
Vidyard makes it easy for sales and marketing teams to turn text-based emails into personalized video messages. Using the Vidyard app, one can send a fully customized video email to a recipient with a personalized introduction, even calling them by name.
Another way to personalize the online experience for customers is to leverage customer data and multichannel support. For example, Spotify and Amazon have almost entirely cracked the personalization nut based on the ability of their AI algorithms to draw powerful insights from user data and customize individual experiences.
3. Be Responsive to Questions
One of the easiest ways to up your customer delight stats is to be responsive to customers’ questions. By responding to their questions, you can ensure they get the answers they need quickly and efficiently. This will help you keep them happy and satisfied with your company.
There are many ways to be responsive to questions. You can provide support through social media or other online channels. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Communication Management (CCM) tools offer a neat way to track and manage questions and conversations from various social media channels, for example,
Besides automating customer interactions, these two tools can also help to personalize and quicken communications with each customer.
Buffer – a social media management tool – is an example of a company that has mastered the art of responsiveness and customer interactions.
Buffer views every customer interaction – email, tweet, like mention, question, or review – as a true privilege. They believe in being truthful and engaging their customers which leads to consumer delight.
It’s essential to respond quickly to questions, especially about an order or product the customer has already received.
So, start by being active on social media. Use the channels to give your customers quick solutions with a human touch. In addition, provide tons of self-help resources in your blog and other pages like the FAQ page.
Also, if you cannot answer a question immediately, let the customer know when they can expect a response. This will help to maintain the customer’s trust and show them that you’re committed to providing good service.
4. Provide Consistent Omni-Channel Support
Omni-channel support is key to delighting customers. By providing consistent support across all channels, you can ensure that no matter the communication form customers use to reach out, they will receive a positive experience.
Multichannel support doesn’t provide the ability to transition seamlessly from one channel to the next and contextualize conversations. An example is a customer who moved their conversation with your team from your social media channel, such as Twitter, to an inbound chatbox.
On the other hand, omnichannel support provides a consistent and connected customer experience across various channels.
Unlike a multichannel approach, an omnichannel strategy allows conversations to be connected and meaningfully transitioned without losing sight or focus on the customer.
This includes promptly responding to questions and complaints via social media, email, a chatbox integrated with an AI writing tool, or even on live calls.
An example of omnichannel support is provided above. You can see that the tool aggregates conversations from across various channels, such as email and social media, and logs them onto one standard dashboard.
However, it’s crucial to be aware of the different channels your customers might use. In addition to phone and email, many customers now prefer to use social media or chatbots for support.
Ensure your customer service team is well-trained in all channels through which they offer support. This will help them provide quick and accurate support to customers. Additionally, monitor all channels for feedback and complaints so that you can address any issues as quickly as possible.
Omnichannel support systems such as Freshdesk and Zendesk allow quick customer feedback, and tracking of conversations, thus improving customer delight.
5. Analyze Customer Feedback
Companies understand how important it is to gather and analyze customer feedback. It offers the opportunity for such companies to respond to concerns, product recommendations, or even suggestions for service or product enhancements.
Participating in collecting and implementing customer feedback and acting on those insights will lead to more delighted customers.
You can collect feedback through:
- Social listening tools, such as BuzzSumo
- Surveys and polls
- Customer feedback communities
- Feedback from chatbots
- In-app feedback
- Customer contact forms and emails
Besides these methods, you could also have a sales or marketing rep call/email a customer personally, asking them for their feedback and support to improve customer delight.
In Closing
It is always important to remember that a satisfied customer will churn faster than a delighted customer. On the other hand, delighted customers are incredibly difficult for competitors to take away.
We’ve discussed methods such as improving content relevance, providing multi/omnichannel support, and quick customer feedback to improve customer delight. A bonus would be to keep your processes and communications transparent with clients.
Remember, it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Even if customer delight costs a little more than regular customer satisfaction, it will generate an impressive return on investment and a reduced customer churn rate. It will also keep customers loyal to your brand for the long term.
