How to treat clients exceptionally and delight them

We are staunch proponents of the *Customer Delight Principle* (Vavra and Keniningham, 2001) and preach empowering team members to delight their clients in terms of both high-quality products and services. The *Customer Delight Principle* (CDP) means exceeding, not merely meeting, customer expectations. This results in delight, an emotional response, not just satisfaction, which drives potential for repeat business and customer recommendations and, thus, loyalty and revenue. So, to treat clients exceptionally well is to delight them.

So, how do you delight customers?  The first step is to figure out what customers expect from your organization.  DMV customers expect a pretty low bar, while the bar for Disney customers is pretty high.  Your organization is likely somewhere in between.  Once you figure out the baseline for what customers expect, then you build a service strategy that defines ways to exceed baseline expectations.  Engaging your frontline team in this process will increase their buy-in and rate of adoption.  Also, they have first-hand knowledge from interacting with your customers, which is priceless.

Everyone on your team plays a role in this – front and back-of-house alike.  Everyone has a customer.  Ideally, ways to exceed expectations will be low cost and easily implemented.  Start molding your culture to embrace the concept of delighting customers.  To do this, incentivize your team.  Reward and recognize those who exceed your and your customers’ expectations.  And then share those experiences across the whole team.

Next, train and coach your team on ways to exceed expectations.  Train them to the service standard you expect.  The key here is to empower your team members to execute in a way that exceeds expectations at the moment of truth.  Hiring the right personality type that matches your desired culture helps, too.  Think of this as a slow but steady system where you want continuous, predictable incremental improvement.  Involve the team in critical self-reflection and strategic planning, not pointing fingers but learning what worked and what didn’t and where everyone can make improvements.  To accomplish this, periodically reevaluate your strategy and continuously refine it.  Lastly, measure, measure, measure!  What gets measured gets improved.

Treating customers excellently will likely result in boosting your organization’s competitive advantage.  Conceptually, it is a matter of figuring out what your customers expect from the exchange and exceeding it based on a deliberate strategy.  Beyond strategic advantages, adopting a customer delight strategy also often has operational benefits such as a happier team and a more positive work environment.

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