Today’s definition of customer satisfaction is no longer limited to how your product performs. The experience they have in the course of interacting with your company matters just as much as the product itself. With the proliferation of online reviews, it’s more important than ever to delight customers. As Comcast famously discovered, a poor customer experience can significantly shape public opinion of your company.
Our company makes online registration software and online fundraising solutions. Month after month, customer referrals continue to be the most effective way our company experiences meteoric growth. Creating spectacular customer experiences is a crucial part of that process.
Here are 6 ways we create unique and delightful experiences for our customers that we’d like to share with you.
Don’t Be A Robot.
Encourage your staff to be relational in addition to being informational. Many companies do a good job in training staff to be informational, but then don’t empower them to be relational with customers.
It’s not unusual for our team to inquire about people’s personal lives in the course of solving customer issues. The result for us has been deep customer loyalty and positive customer reviews.
Be Transparent.
Consumers have a different relationship with brands than they did a few years ago. Today, consumers take great interest in knowing behind the scenes information about a company.
Buffer, a social media tool, has an entire section of their website dedicated to transparency with a mission of being the most transparent company ever. They disclose sales figures, financials, salaries and many other interesting posts revealing the inward workings at the company. Buffer has validated the enormous consumer interest in corporate transparency. While you don’t have to take it to this extreme, you could champion transparency by writing a blog detailing experiences at the company, starting a behind the scenes podcast, or host an AMA (ask me anything) session where your customers can learn unique tidbits about your company.
Let Personalities Shine.
Your staff is diverse and interesting. Celebrate who they are and provide information about them to your customers that can be found on your website, help center, live chat or directory.
For our entire customer support department, we spent time writing fun Chuck-Norris-like bios that describe their personal interests, but with fun twists to them. Customers love it. You wouldn’t think customers take time to read them, but they do. Now when a customer works with our staff, they feel like they are working with someone they already know.
Celebrate Customer Wins
When a customer succeeds using your product or service, don’t hesitate to celebrate the win. We try to celebrate customer successes whenever possible. Whether it is a celebratory animated gif, a quick fun team video, or a full blown care package mailed to them, we want our customers to know we are rooting for them. They appreciate that you noticed and are blown away to receive the celebratory gesture.
Let Customer Voices Be Heard At The Top
If something doesn’t go exactly right for a customer, give them access to the most important people who might take their call. Key influential people sometimes tend to be isolated from the regular voices of customers. If someone wants to share their experience (good or bad), let them know they can share it with the most important people who have the most authority.
My Co-Founder and I do this regularly and welcome any customer to send us an email or speak to us any time about any issue, idea or suggestion or the company. Your customers will feel like they are receiving exceptional service when they are not limited to whom they can engage with.
Invite Customers To Visit You
If you want to take customer experiences to the next level, have an open door policy for your customers. We openly welcome any customer, prospective customer, or even insurance solicitor, to stop by and play us a game of ping pong. For any of our customers, we promise to take them out to happy hour after work with a few people from our team. Customers who have these experiences with us are some of our best referrals.
We are always thinking how we can take wow and delight our customers. These are our most effective strategies to date and hope they work for you to create fanatical support for your brand too.
