Top of Heart Not Top of Mind? Sparking Delight Across Every Customer Experience

Top of Heart Not Top of Mind? Sparking Delight Across Every Customer Experience

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As you probably know, TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness) is a key marketing metric. It is calculated by asking consumers to share which brand comes to mind first for a particular sector or niche (e.g., automotive or coffee).

I advocate for an alternative metric which I refer to as TOHE (Top of Heart Engagement). I calculate this by asking consumers which brand in this sector delights them most?

For me, delight should be our customer relationship objective since it changes brain chemistry and enhances the memorableness of service experiences. In research published in?Science,?Professor Wolfram Schultz found dopamine levels (a neurotransmitter that affects pleasure) increase when we experience a pleasant surprise - something he refers to as a “positive prediction error.?

Let's capitalize on the power of a positive surprise by considering important distinctions and nuances between Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Delight.

  • Satisfaction involves meeting customer expectations, while delight involves exceeding them.?
  • Satisfaction is a rational process of assessing outcomes. It is a byproduct of calculations from our frontal lobes.
  • Delight is an emotional process that activates the limbic system.?
  • Delight emerges from feeling positively surprised. A common delight utterance is “wow.”
  • Satisfying experiences are easily forgotten. They fade into the background.
  • Delightful experiences are easily remembered. They stand out from the ordinary.
  • Satisfying experiences are seldom shared.
  • Delightful experiences are seldom kept to oneself. Many delightful interactions get reshared, and some go viral.
  • Delightful experiences are typically the result of teamwork and usually reflect small gestures as opposed to heroic efforts.

For more on how to deliver delight, I hope you will consider reviewing my book

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This downloadable infographic summarizes the content mentioned above. Feel free to share or post it.

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To learn more about our team, please visit?josephmichelli.com. To speak to me about designing pleasure into experiences, please go to?josephmichelli.com/contact.

David M. Jones

Performance Excellence coach and consultant helping leaders of small and mid-sized organizations break through the day-to-day firefighting and achieve the results they've always thought possible.

2 年

Interesting insight into the brain science behind satisfaction being a rational process and delight being an emotional process.

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Joseph Iannone

?? Chief Growth Officer | Trusted Source | IT Solutions Provider

2 年

Agree Joseph Michelli, Ph.D. as satisfying and delighting are different because satisfying seems to be static whence delightful is dynamic and continual in the mind it may seem. Carpe forte incredibili esse. Seize the chance to be extraordinary.

Bill Quiseng

Chief Experience Officer at billquiseng.com. Award-winning Customer CARE Expert, Keynote Speaker, and Blogger

2 年

Customers don't seek B2Bor B2C companies. They engage companies that are H2H. Human to Human. One to One. Customers don't care how big you are. They only care how big you care about them. You are happy because customers left satisfied. But that's not good enough. Satisfied customers feel service is good, not better, just average. Nobody raves about average. And satisfied customers will leave when they find something better or less expensive. So don't serve to satisfy customers. Serve to WOW them. Serve to care.

Noi Ha Nguyen

B2B sales expert who won many multi-million-dollar deals to the global adventure with connecting and interviewing over 1100 leaders in 80 countries in 3.5 years to demonstrate the power of curiosity & creativity.

2 年

Subscribed. So excited to join and to learn from you Joseph. Thank you!

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