The Power of Surprise

In a recent post I documented the fact that customer satisfaction is entirely subjective, and virtually all metrics designed to gauge customer satisfaction are based on how a customer feels their experience is, compared to their prior expectations.

As a result, simply to maintain your current level of customer satisfaction you have to constantly improve your service. Why? Because as companies around the world continue to focus on using better technology and more streamlined processes to improve their service, customer expectations increase as well. Every time a customer is well served by Amazon, or USAA, or Ally Bank, their expectations of the next company they deal with go up.  So any company that merely maintains its current quality of service will inevitably experience declining customer satisfaction levels.

But in addition to service improvements, you can also increase your customer satisfaction by managing your customer’s expectations strategically. 

This, I think, is the real secret behind the power of surprise. When you surprise a customer with something unexpected, something “out of context,” you are by definition confounding the customer’s prior expectations.

It doesn’t have to be an “over the top” surprise to do the trick, either.

Think about it: Surprise is a human emotion. Company processes and organizational procedures don’t rely on surprise. Algorithms are never surprised. The only entity that can experience “surprise” is a human being, and when you go to the trouble of surprising your customer, you are showing your humanity, not your policies or your formulas or your offerings.

Humanity is the secret sauce that makes it so powerful when a customer’s expectations are exceeded, in some surprising manner. 

As Bill Price and David Jaffe say in their most recent book Your Customer Rules!,

What makes surprises so alluring isn't necessarily their content or grandiosity. Even a small kindness, when it's unexpected and freely offered, can change the course of a customer's day. Somehow the unexpected aspect, the surprise, is much more important than the thing itself. Being taken unaware changes the emotional response. The customer is suddenly aware that there are real people on the other side of the transaction, thinking about how to make the day just a little bit better.

Small gestures, unexpected surprises – these are the things that convince a customer that your business isn’t just a faceless machine operated on autopilot, with rules and policies prescribing how every interaction and customer experience must unfold.

You are human. And because you’re human, the customer can trust you.