Tuesday, March 10, 2015

How to Delight your Customers

Customer delight is not just a post-sale activity, it should be practiced both pre and post-sale.  This is a priority. This will get your customers to trust you, and recommend your product or service to someone else.  Customer delight is key because it spans the entire life cycle of the inbound methodology.  Delighting customer is turning them into promoters.  There was a quote in the video and it basically said “if you build trust between the people you serve, they will return the favor and serve you.”  The inbound experience is formed by every interaction with you or an employee.  These interactions contribute to the inbound experience.  However, these interactions can either make or break you.  They must be trust building experiences, not trust breaking.  





Three Pillars to Customer Delight:
  1. Innovation
  2. Communication
  3. Education


Always challenge the status quo, this will help to serve people with the right products and services.  Learn from your buyer personas how you can better innovate.  Being personal is also important.  This is a critical piece of building an inbound experience.  And lastly, educate people to grow their knowledge.  Embrace these pillars, and become inspired by them.  


Seven Customer Delight Guidelines
  1. Delight Employees
  2. Educate Employees
  3. Empower Employees
  4. Listen
  5. Ask Questions
  6. Help & Educate
  7. Follow up


“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first”  Simon Sinek

Delight your employees and they will delight your customers.  Happy employees create happy customers and allow for sustained customer delight.  Customers and employees are a business’s greatest assets.  Understand this or you will never be able to delight both groups.  Test for culture fit.  
Happy employees will create happy customers.  Both customers and employees are a business’s greatest assets.  They both cannot function without each other.  This must be understood, otherwise you will never be able to delight both groups.  First, the employee must be tested for culture fit. HubSpot suggests creating a hiring methodology that tests:  skills, culture fit, beliefs, experience, and ideas.  This will help figure out whether they will become an asset to both the company and the customer.


“Every small interaction makes a difference…. because they create the larger experience”


The next step in delighting customers it to educate your employees.  First, create team principles that your employees will live by.  This will create a sense of individuality and empower employees to make decisions on their own.  Educate your employees by teaching them the pillars of customer delight.  Create a new hire training program and implement it so standards are set.  Develop training programs that are on-going.  Educate employees by doing, rather than saying.  Share stories of great customer service.  Teach the employee what solving for the customer means, and what it looks like. All employees will contribute to one another’s education within the company.  Remember it is everyone’s job to contribute to delighting the customers.  


Empowering customers is done by allowing employees’ personalities to shine through.  Empower your employees with a customer delight checklist.  The checklist contains:  solve their problems, provide recommendations, and be enthusiastic and fun.  


Listen to your customers.  Collect data that is both qualitative and quantitative about the inbound experience.  Use social monitoring as a listening tool.  Social monitoring will automatically monitor what is being said about your company on social media.  When communicating with the customers, make sure you are listening and figuring out what the core issue you.  Repeat what they've said back to them to make sure you’re both on the same page.  

Asking questions will help you learn more about the customers problem or their question.  This will help to educate them and solve their problem.  Pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal communication.  The next step is to help and educate.  Use the checklist to become a problem solver.  This will help build trust with people.  And finally, the last step to delighting customers is to follow up.  This will ensure that your customer’s problem has been resolved.  This means that you have become a true “problem solver.”  

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