Simple things to delight your customers
Picture the scene. It’s Friday evening and I’m waiting for my weekly shop from Ocado to arrive which I’ve booked to be delivered between 6:00 – 8:00pm. At 7:50pm the phone rings “Hello Mr Smith, It’s your Ocado driver here. I’m stuck in traffic and won’t be with you until just after 8pm. Will that be OK?” “Of course” is my reply. And I relax. All is right with the world. I haven’t been forgotten. I feel like I’ve been treated as an individual. The delivery arrives as promised.
Now compare this to another food delivery service (who shall remain nameless). The delivery time slot came and went. Not a word. I had to phone the company to ask them where my order was. They couldn’t get hold of the driver. Finally it arrives an hour and a half late and some of the items have been mixed up with another order. As the driver has left I have to call up the company again to say my order has been mixed up with someone else’s. They eventually get hold of him and he returns to pick up the incorrect items and deliver the correct ones. The reason was, he said rather grumpily, that he was a stand-in driver and he ‘just delivers the bags’. To add salt into an ever deepening wound, my Gillette Fusion razors were replaced with a pack of Gillette for Women Venus Divine Razor Blades!
The interesting thing about these two experiences is that it took very little for the first experience to be perceived as a delightful experience and for the second to be well…distressing. I’ve since used Ocado many times with different drivers and each one of them embodies the same quality of service. The service has very obviously been designed to delight the customer and it shows.
What can we learn from these experiences? The basic entry level requirements for site usability, features and functionality are currently such that businesses will need to look beyond the site itself in order to start delighting customers and delivering differentiation. What could you bring to your customer experience that would delight them? It doesn’t have to be fancy, gimmicky or grandiose. It could be something that takes the worry or concern away from your customers. It could be a surprise that you package in with your delivery. It could be educating your call centre staff so that they are all empowered to deal with customer queries from start to finish.
Zappos, the US based store, has a set of ten brand values – the first of which states ‘At Zappos, anything worth doing is worth doing with WOW’. In fact, they never leave you in doubt as to where the core focus lies – delighting the customer. They care. I read a delightful story that Zappos didn’t have a particular pair of shoes a customer was after. The Zappos representative proceeded to call other local stores, even if they were competitors, to ask if they stocked the shoe. Now that’s service! You can read about the other Zappos brand values here.
Simple things really can delight your customers. What could you as an eCommerce business start doing today that would WOW your customers?
