Remember the cases when clients show strong advocacy for their favorite company? That's what customer delight stands for. It defines the greatest extent of consumer loyalty you can gain. But how to retrieve insights on clients' experiences and use them to develop strong positive emotional bonds?

A good look into customer experience could be a gold mine for your promotional campaign, sales, or customer service. It helps you realize what keeps leads emotionally engaged to work out your brand image or new offers with their preferences in mind. 

Today we invite you to learn about worthwhile customer delight ideas and metrics that would help you evaluate their efficacy.

Why Is Customer Delight Important?

Having your customers surprised and amused yields sustainable retention and sales rates. Additionally, you can derive intangible but valuable winnings. Those that refer to psychology. You're letting customers know that you care and appreciate them for choosing your product or service.

Hence, by providing some extra rewards for clients, you'll get:

1. Supreme level of affinity and trust. People will stay loyal and acknowledge your efforts if you continuously remind them of their importance to your brand.
2. Longer client lifetime (CL). Long-term loyalty is the stepping stone to your success for the distant marketing prospect. There is an inverse proportion between CL and customer churn rate. So once fewer people switch from your service, they'll continue purchasing from you longer.
3. Effective word-of-mouth marketing. Around 36% of people surveyed by CFI Group share their customer service experiences, both negative and positive, through social media. Such referral from a real audience is a potent marketing channel that acquires new customers for free. Delighted customers would become your brand's ambassadors, promoting the products and services they sincerely enjoyed.
4. Trustworthy business reputation. Keep in mind that your company is as good as it's told about. With plenty of devoted customers, you can rely on their advocacy in case of criticism and spiteful reviews.

Customer Satisfaction Vs. Customer Delight

However similar these things might appear from a glance, it's essential to draw a line between them. While client satisfaction refers to the needs fulfilled through the purchase and service, the delight state exceeds and goes beyond it. It is a delight that will help you retain high-value clients regardless of the intense competitiveness of the market you belong to.

You need to consider that consumer expectations tend to become higher. Especially when there's a great deal of side offers they receive daily. Hence, only exclusive features and special treatment from your side can make customers stay.

Who Is Responsible for Delighting Prospects and Customers?

Both marketing, sales, and customer service representatives are involved in building memorable customer experiences. It stems from the flywheel-like inbound model, where prospects go through the consequential stages of Attraction, Engagement, and Delight.

(Source)

First comes Attraction, when a brand makes an offer in the most appealing way. Engagement comes along. It drives leads to make a purchase. Finally, the satisfied buyer gets rewarded with a Delight delivered by courteous customer support.

Instead of one lead customer delight specialist, truly knowledgeable inbound teams align their effort to create delightful experiences. It is reasonable because the idea of surpassing customers' expectations may and should encompass every interaction with your business.

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Customer Delight Principles and How to Use Them

Although we've mentioned that delighting customers requires going beyond their basic needs, you can enhance their satisfaction and gain lifelong loyalty by relatively undemanding measures. Here are core principles you should implement to boost client satisfaction.

1. Provide Real-Time Operative Support

Nothing discourages customers more than feeling that they're undertreated and ignored. Even if you can't process their request instantly, you must inform them that their request is of the highest priority and you're working on it.

2. Leverage Customer Voice Tools

Let people speak out about your company and what you do, and always gratify them for sharing their impressions. Utilize online or automated phone surveys to gather and analyze customer feedback.

3. Personalize Interaction at Every Touchpoint

You will immensely please customers by demonstrating awareness of their personal needs and goals. Thanks to CRM-based automated solutions, you can send personalized emails or postcards and customize mobile app notifications and tips according to every interaction someone makes. Take the most of a customer data analysis to communicate with clients regarding their current longings and requests.

4. Make Loyal Customers Feel Special

To nurture loyal customers who are already satisfied with your products and services, you must focus on delivering them something extra. With an advantageous loyalty program, you may take an already durable and productive partnership to a higher level.

5. Build and Nurture a Community

People are keen on participating in groups with the same goals and interests. The community is just the right space for customers to exchange their experiences, share tips, or ask for expert opinions. The community can also become a great platform to announce special events for members only.

6. Be Unexpected 

It is memorable impressions that ensure long-lasting delight, so be inventive. You can gratify the client for choosing your company with a little extra add-on to the online purchase or offline service. Those could be handwritten postcards, stickers, new product free samples, first purchase promo codes, e.g.

You can be as extravagant as you like, but remember to stay meaningful. The add-ons are not just fancy things; they represent your appreciation.

Another suggestion for you is to improve and mix up delight tactics consistently. You can get plenty of insights by researching the commonly known customer delight examples.

5 Worthwhile Customer Delight Ideas You Can Adapt

1. Feature customer reviews in your blog. Who would reject the offer to be reposted or mentioned in your official blog? If a satisfied customer made an informative and engaging review that covers full product potential, you should feature it in your next blog post. This option works particularly well for promoting members of your partnership network.
2. Personalized CEO/chief executive letter. Tailored direct mail is highly effective for B2B direct mail campaigns. Such mailings can include the appreciation for clients for a long-lasting partnership or the announcement of new service conditions.
3. Engage with customers publicly through social media. Users would appreciate your response to their suggestions and feedback. It's a great way to show that you enjoy communicating with them beyond selling or providing client support.
4. Offer to join a testing program. You have an excellent chance to honor customers' loyalty and acknowledge it by offering them to participate in VIP product testing. This method kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, you delight your best customers by letting them into something not for everyone's eye. Secondly, you run targeted marketing research.
5. Commitment to a cause. Consumers highly appreciate businesses that aren't strictly revenue-driven. If your company allocates part of the profits to charity and non-profit organizations, you also encourage your clients to contribute to socially responsible initiatives.

How Do You Measure Customer Satisfaction?

To derive insights on customer satisfaction and overall experience, you can leverage Net Promoter Score (NPS) and CSAT metrics.

NPS surveys define the general experiences and specify the percentage of people satisfied/dissatisfied with your company's performance. The main goal of NPS is to segment the respondents into three categories according to how they rank your service from 0 to 10. The lowest rank is given by detractors, the neutral by indifferent passives, and the highest by promoters. 

The total score in NPS would be the percentage of promoters minus detractors. With previous NPS survey results, you can assess whether your customer experience is on the rise or not.

CSAT shows the percentage of respondents satisfied after interacting with your business at a specific touchpoint. It allows assessing the efficiency of client support or satisfaction with the service/product itself.

CSAT surveys usually require customers to score their impressions from 1 to 5. Calculating the total score is simple: you should divide the number of respondents with positive perceptions (those who gave 4 or 5 points) by their total quantity. 

In e-commerce, there is no difficulty in customer experience automation. Data from NPS and CSAT surveys gets imported to CRM right away. Consequently, it is utilized in automated reports for personnel or may enable triggers for client reactivation emails.

How Does Inkit Help Grow Your Customer Satisfaction?

Inkit is a reach enablement platform you can integrate with your CRM to automate mail marketing and document generation. These automations allow you to stay in touch with customers more effectively and nurture them through personalized marketing for higher satisfaction with your services.

While Inkit Send automates trigger-based mail printing and delivery, Render enables automated PDF creation. This way, you can automate customer reach both online and offline.

Interested? Then try Inkit today for free to meet your clients' expectations.