The Art of Delighting Your Customers 🙃 - Part 1
Easier said... and done by relentlessly focusing on 3 factors.
But first, it is said that breaking a tender coconut before the start of any major project guarantees that everything goes well. So:
Moving back to the topic…
Customer delight isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
Over the 8 years that I spent at Zomato, I’ve been fortunate enough to learn first hand the importance of customer delight across different teams. Whether it be delight from delivery of an order, delight from our marketing campaigns or designs, delight from reading our blog posts, delight from chatting with our support team - customer delight has been at the core of our growth story since inception.
How can you improve at delighting your customers?
There is no secret ingredient. However, if we had to logically break it down to identify what drives customer delight, then…
Magic happens when you:
Maximise the value delivered to your customers
Deliver the value at the right time and,
Deliver value in a way that your customers can easily relate to
We end up with a relationship similar to the Fogg Behavioural Model. All three factors have to come together for it to be a success. In this post, we’ll focus on Value. The subsequent posts will cover Timing and Relatability.
Maximise the Value delivered to your customers.
Simply put, value is determined by how unique your solution is to the user. Examples of a few products who differentiate themselves from the norm:
The same concept of value can be extended to all forms of user communication. How do you maximise value in every customer interaction? There is a status quo expectation attached to every marketing/growth approach today. How you differentiate yourself makes a huge difference in an overcrowded universe of marketing communication. Some recent examples below:
How you approach brand marketing…
How you engage with your users…
How you leverage every opportunity/interaction to build user love towards your brand…
But before you even start to communicate, it is important to identify the core value you deliver to your users. You have to get this right. No amount of communication can get you traction if you do not have a product of high value. It helps to start with “What is my objective”, “Why would this fail?” and follow the 4 steps below:
List out 2-3 critical questions (this stems from ‘Why would this fail?’ and you flip the answers into ‘Can I or Can we’ questions. Examples below.)
Layout approach to find the answers
Get feedback from friends/family/colleagues/industry experts/user interviews
Iterate your solution or product or communication and roll out. Go back to 3.
For a more in-depth process around this, do read Sprint (A Design Sprint Book). Meanwhile, let’s take a quick look at a few examples for practical application.
A) Starting with something simple - This Newsletter.
B) 48 Plates - an amazing restaurant recently started by my close friends - Upasana Nath and Sheeba Rana, in Gurgaon. World Cuisine; Serving 48 carefully curated dishes.
C) Launching a B2C marketplace in a new market
Getting the Objective and Critical Question(s) right ensures your efforts flow in the right direction. The value of the outcome depends on the quality of these two aspects along with good execution.
Once you have your core value identified and perfected, you can apply the same approach to the communication route you wish to take. A quick example from a campaign we ran in 2017 where we wanted to leverage outdoor media to increase awareness for a use-case and our brand.
Critical question(s): Can we get people to stop and put a smile on their face through our billboards?
Akshar and team explored multiple approaches. We narrowed down on couple of options. Tested it out internally with our colleagues and the wordplay on songs and phrases was a clear winner which we went live with.
What’s your approach to maximising value of your product or your marketing communication? What tools or frameworks do you use? Any examples of certain brands doing this well in recent times? Would love to get your inputs.
Looking forward to sharing more observations around the topic in the next post (on Friday, 9th August). If you have any suggestions or feedback for the newsletter, I would love to hear it - I’m at prao24 on Twitter.
Cheers,
Prao