As a business owner, it’s important to keep up to date with your customers. This means ensuring that they are happy with the service or product you are providing and whether they are being loyal to your brand and using it multiple times.
To do this, you could start collecting reviews for your brand or you could track which percentage of your sales are from a returning customer. It can be difficult to hear that a customer has negative feedback or a grievance, but this is where ‘the customer is always right’ comes into play.
Understanding ‘the customer is always right
There is no denying that ‘the customer is always right‘ is a well-known phrase, especially among those who work in customer-facing roles. Regardless of business type or industry, a lot of emphases is put on the customer always being right.
Not only does this encourage service staff to strive for customer satisfaction at all times, but it encourages them to do everything they can to satisfy customer needs and wishes. It’s not simply a case of agreeing with anything the customer says or does but going the extra mile to ensure they are completely happy with the service or product being provided.
The aim is to provide a service that each individual customer is pleased with, in the hope they remember this and return at a later date. However, in the digital world, is ‘the customer always right’ enough? With the evolving business world and customers expecting more from brands, it might be time to strive for more.
If you know anything about running a successful business, you will know that customer satisfaction is key. This involves meeting your customers’ expectations and ensuring they are pleased. However, it shouldn’t stop there.
A lot of people underestimate the importance of customer delight, which is the process of going above and beyond your customers’ expectations. Rather than simply aiming to satisfy a customer and please them, customer delight focuses on creating a positive experience that surpasses their expectations from beginning to end.
Focus on ‘customer delight’ rather than ‘customer satisfaction
With so many other competitor businesses out there, it’s no longer enough to offer a good level of customer satisfaction. Today, customers expect a lot more from brands, and doing everything you can to create a memorable customer experience is key.
Though satisfaction can lead to someone using your business again, delight leads to them becoming loyal customers and supporters of your brand. These customers are more likely to recommend you to others, post about you on social media, and champion you as the brand evolves.
Compared to a merely satisfied customer, a delighted customer is more likely to praise you publicly and share their positive experience with others. This kind of marketing is hugely effective, but impossible to achieve without an organic bond between the business and a delighted customer. This is why customer delight is paramount.
Customer delight can be achieved in a number of ways, and it centers around the needs and wants of the customer. It’s important to take the time to truly understand your customer and what they are looking for in a brand. This allows you to personalize their experience, whether that is suggesting products you know they will love or offering a service that is somewhat unique to them.
Instead of approaching everything you do with ‘the customer is always right’, approach everything in a way that gives the customer more than they could have expected. Rather than simply saying thank you for a purchase, offer them a discount for their next one.
Instead of sending an order with a brief thank, you note, send an order with a free gift or sample. As well as delighting the customer, acts such as these help to build a strong, long-term connection between you. Customer satisfaction is telling the customer that they are right, but delight is going one step further and impressing them with what you are capable of as a business.
Yes, the customer is always right
On the whole, when you are running a successful business, the customer is always right. This should be at the forefront of how you interact with customers. After all, telling a customer they are wrong is likely to send them straight to your competitor.
In order to retain loyal customers and continue to convert leads into sales, a customer should feel as though they are correct, and their opinion is valid. Whether they provide positive feedback or criticism, it’s important for a customer to know they have been heard. You can go one step further by aiming for customer delight, instead of settling for customer satisfaction, but the basis of how you operate the business should be ‘the customer is always right’.
for more articles.
