Creating delightful surprises in your customer experience design can boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth. But how can you design surprises that are relevant, meaningful, and memorable for your customers? Here are some tips to help you craft surprising and delightful customer experiences.
The first step to creating delightful surprises is to understand your customers' needs, preferences, expectations, and emotions. You can use various methods, such as surveys, interviews, feedback, personas, journey maps, and empathy maps, to gain insights into your customers' perspectives and pain points. By understanding your customers, you can identify opportunities to exceed their expectations and delight them with unexpected value.
Surveys can provide you with valuable information and insight, but what if you are lucky enough to share face to face experiences with your customer. There is nothing more valuable than being able to connect with each client in a completely personal way. In building that relationship through pure conversation and sharing your own experiences, you are able to establish trust. When people trust you, they will give you insight into what matters to them. This not only provides you with the opportunity to create a tailored experience, but it means that the client is more likely to send new customers your way. At day’s end, if you make that client feel special, they will not easily forget the experience.
The second step to creating delightful surprises is to align them with your brand identity, values, and promise. You want your surprises to reflect your brand personality and tone, and to reinforce your brand message and positioning. You also want your surprises to be consistent and coherent across all touchpoints and channels. By aligning your surprises with your brand, you can create a distinctive and authentic customer experience that builds trust and loyalty.
The third step to creating delightful surprises is to be creative and relevant. You want your surprises to be original and innovative, but also relevant and useful for your customers. You can use various techniques, such as brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating, to generate and refine ideas for surprising and delightful customer experiences. You can also look for inspiration from other industries, domains, or contexts, and adapt them to your own situation. By being creative and relevant, you can create a customer experience that stands out and adds value.
You can use behavioral science techniques like reciprocity (offering unexpected rewards), scarcity (limited-time offers), and the mere exposure effect (repeated positive interactions) to create memorable and delightful surprises. Knowing these techniques, you can engineer the emotional journey through customer interactions and the emotional peaks and valleys. This can ensure that the overall journey to arrive at the “surprise” moments of truth build enough suspense and maximize impact.
The fourth step to creating delightful surprises is to personalize and customize them for your customers. You want your surprises to be tailored and targeted to your customers' preferences, behaviors, and contexts. You can use various tools, such as data, analytics, segmentation, and automation, to deliver personalized and customized surprises at the right time, place, and channel. You can also use personal touches, such as names, messages, or gestures, to make your surprises more human and emotional. By personalizing and customizing your surprises, you can create a customer experience that is relevant and meaningful.
Here are a few creative ideas to think about: 1. Personalized Thank-You Notes 2. Birthday and Anniversary Rewards 3. Random Acts of Kindness 4. Sneak Peeks and Previews 5. Community Engagement 6. Thank-You Videos 7. Referral Rewards Remember that the key to creating delightful surprises is to make them genuine, unexpected, and thoughtful. Tailor your surprises to match your brand's personality and customer preferences. Regularly monitor and adjust your surprise initiatives based on customer feedback and data to ensure they have a positive impact on satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth marketing.
The fifth step to creating delightful surprises is to balance their frequency and intensity. You want your surprises to be frequent enough to keep your customers engaged and delighted, but not too frequent to lose their impact and novelty. You also want your surprises to be intense enough to elicit positive emotions and reactions, but not too intense to overwhelm or annoy your customers. You can use various metrics, such as feedback, ratings, reviews, referrals, retention, and revenue, to measure and optimize the frequency and intensity of your surprises. By balancing frequency and intensity, you can create a customer experience that is memorable and sustainable.
Adam StJohn Lawrence explained this beautifully at the ‘This is Service Design Doing’ Executive School session back in March of 2023. You must built a story arch that makes sense for your experience and the quiet moments must add to the surprises, not take away from them. Think about the soundtrack of the famous movie “Jaws”, it’s already playing in your head. The pauses build towards the energetic explosion and shark attack. The pauses serve as moments of curiosity telling the viewer/listener that something is coming and if we didn’t have those pauses and were all surprise and excitement we would exhaust our audience. Everything in due measure. Draft your customer’s journey and establish moments of excitement, then test and iterate.
The sixth and final step to creating delightful surprises is to learn and improve from your customers' feedback and behavior. You want to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness and impact of your surprises on your customers' satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. You also want to solicit and analyze your customers' feedback and suggestions, and use them to improve and innovate your customer experience design. By learning and improving from your customers, you can create a customer experience that is adaptive and responsive.
Learning and improving from customer feedback is essential for building lasting relationships and fostering customer loyalty. One aspect that I've found particularly impactful is the proactive collection of feedback. Encouraging customers to share their thoughts and suggestions can be a powerful source of innovation. By actively listening to their input, we gain a deeper understanding of their desires and pain points, which can guide our customer experience design. Furthermore, it's important to view customer feedback as a valuable resource for continuous improvement. By incorporating their suggestions into our strategies, we not only enhance the overall customer experience but also demonstrate our commitment to meeting their needs.
We try to incorporate "surprise and delight" touch points in our product after we truly understand their needs and habits. That can be tricky. But one thing that will never ever go out of style is customer support that goes above an beyond. When CSMs and support agents take those extra few minutes to really understand the customer problem and provide a complete solution; all with a sunny disposition :)...well that creates a memorable experience every single time. Make sure your customer facing team isn't just using that macro or talking off a sales sheet. This all boils down to the buzzword of the day: empathy. Try harder to be empathetic and you'll create customer experiences that delight every with every connection.