Customer delight is the latest focus in customer service. A delighted customer is deemed to have greater brand loyalty and to actively promote your company on social media. Yet according to the NTT 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, “Just 15.5% [of companies] place ‘customer delight’ as the top driving force behind their customer journey design strategy.” Yet 81.6% acknowledge that customer experience (CX) provides them with a competitive edge. So where’s the disconnect?
What is customer delight?
Customer delight is exceeding customer expectations or eliciting a response of joy and surprise. However, when you’re dealing with psychological entities – people – the ability to delight depends on who you’re targeting. Not only that, customer expectations are higher than ever and once these are met, they are rapidly habituated as a baseline expectation. So how can you continually exceed with ever-changing goalposts?
Low customer effort
As it turns out, you don’t have to. Research reported in the Harvard Business Review by the Customer Contact Council in 2010 showed that delighting customers doesn’t build brand loyalty. The key is to reduce customer effort when resolving problems. Additionally, using these insights “can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.” Well, that is a delight!
But wouldn’t it be great to do both?
Customer service
The NTT report found that the Middle East and Africa (MEA) are trailing behind when it comes to delivering an effortless CX. Whilst MEA organisations are better at using social media to track customer sentiment, they underutilise voice of customer (VoC) feedback to innovate and inform their customer journeys.
But why does this matter as long as you’re adhering to your mission statement and brand identity?
Surely, that’s what consumers are buying into when they click?
Maybe the first time but customers are far more interested in how easy it is to get what they want. Designing ease of use into all of your touchpoints, creating omnichannel consistency and using VoC to pre-empt issues and innovate services will result in a higher volume of return traffic.
Service design
Service design is a proactive approach that focuses on the customer’s interaction with your company and applies to every single step along the way. It combines your strategy with CX to create excellence and consistency. Building service into the heart of your business allows you to innovate, eliminate pain points and deliver on promises.
However, there’s no point implementing changes that don’t resonate with your customer base. For example, launching an online financial tracking app is a waste of your time and money if your customers prefer to call in. So you need to listen first and then figure out how to factor that into your offerings.
Start by establishing a formal VoC process and creating a variety of opportunities for feedback to help you understand what your consumers actually want. Enrich this information by using a data intelligence platform will not only inform strategic decision-making but also highlight opportunities for streamlining and improvement.
Analytics
The NTT report found that, “Organizations with access to enterprise-wide CX analytics systems have reduced the percentage of disenchanted customers to 21.4%. Organizations functioning without these systems receive negative CX scores from 49.3% of their customer base.”
Now that’s an interesting statement. So what makes analytics so important? With the ever-increasing quantity of consumer data, analytics allows you to determine relevance and map relationships between data points. This includes monitoring VoC feedback to derive valuable insights for improving CX, pre-empting issues and innovating services.
Locstat’s powerful graph intelligence platform includes complex event processing (CEP) and graph database technology which enriches and contextualises your data. Machine learning (ML) algorithms draw on historical and real-time information to improve processes with each iteration. A user-friendly dashboard empowers your employees with the necessary information for assisting customers and implementing beneficial changes to your organisation.
Give your customers effortless and
delightful interactions with Locstat!
