When was the last time your customer/s did a Happy Dance

As a small, growing digital agency, Outlaw Social faces the challenge that all start ups encounter - the delicate trade off between demonstrating value to our clients and retaining enough profit to facilitate our growth. It's the chicken and egg scenario that most service based businesses have to endure. Yet this challenge of being time & resource poor presents, what I believe, to be the biggest opportunity for any start-up business. The opportunity to be resourceful, bold & innovative when presenting solutions to your customers.

As a best guess, around 50% of our new customers have had a "bad experience" with digital marketing or creative agencies in the past, typically concerning poor communication, lack of tangible results and most importantly the agency in question not having priced accordingly to deliver any true value. For this reason, we are completely transparent around expectatitions at the first point of contact with our customers, communicating that we think differently, deliver differently and cost appropriately for our services to deliver results. When we connect with businesses and brands that understand our value proposition, is where the true magic starts to happen....

We are 5 month old business, but from the outset, as a team we have worked to this mantra;

"Every piece of work we produce is an opportunity for us to shine and connect with customers that we can add tremendous value to.

Every result that we deliver is an opportunity to make our customers do a HAPPY DANCE."

When we embody this mantra, and remind ourselves of it daily, the work that we produce for our customers becomes exceptional, and way beyond what our output 'should be' as a small, growing agency.

When we were instructed to help The Rocks Hotel launch their business online to an exceptionally tight timescale, we embraced the opportunity and brought our mantra into reality. We delivered the following:

• Brand conception and creation
• New website design
• Video production on 10 visual assets
• Food and venue photography
• Social media management
• Launch campaign strategy & implementation

The results of efficient time management, flexibility and innovative suggestion were great and there were Happy Dances all round when we achieved the following results:

• Facebook likes skyrocketed from 1,300 to 4,500 in 2 weeks
• Messenger bot opt in rate of 96%
• A single video with 90,000 organic views
• Launch competition with 3,400 shares and 250,000 organic reach

So much so that the business owner gave us this glowing review;

"We employed the team at Outlaw to deliver a launch strategy for this new restaurant. Initially when filming the visual assets, they worked seamlessly around a refurbishment and the finished articles were great. The results from the launch campaign were impressive with our Facebook page growing significantly in a very short space of time. An easy outfit to work with, who continue to overdeliver on all of their services for our portfolio."

-Craig Minto, Owner

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Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

One of our favourite sources of inspiration as an agency comes from Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness.

Tony and his team have created a culture that is completely devoted to customer satisfaction, being completely unconventional and innovative in their approach. At the core, Zappos are an online shoe retailer, but as many of their customers will proclaim; "They don't deliver shoes, they deliver happiness".

But how? Here is one of my favourite examples:

Pizza delivery. It has become a bit of a marketers myth, that Zappos will deliver a pizza if you ask them too, and there are countless examples of customers actually sharing social proof of this happening. The thought behind this, is that Zappos' customer support team is available to do just that, support customers, and if that involves ordering them a pizza, then so be it.

The story goes that Hsieh took his clients out for a night in the town so when the bar closed they all went back to their hotel room. One of his clients craved for pizza but the hotel’s room service was closed for the night. Hsieh suggested that this client call Zappos for this request, even though his company is a fashion retailer. He was that confident about his company’s customer service.

Of course Zappos did not deliver pizza, but the rep who took the call at 2AM, found three pizza shops that were still open near the hotel and made the order for the client.

Zappos was able to cultivate a culture that offers only outstanding customer support. They make customers so satisfied that people actually describes Zappos as “Happiness in a box.”

A note on Outlaw Social: As an agency, even in a time poor environment, we consciously make time to think creatively for each and every client. Here are 2 examples:

1.) Customer Power Hours - Each week we select 2-3 of our clients and spend an hour each, without distraction, focused on big picture creative thinking with the goal of producing ideas that can instigate significant growth in their businesses. The results of creating this space can be transformational.

2.) Satisfaction Surveys - A recent development that we are proud to be rolling out this month. Alongside our customer strategy for the month ahead, we will be proactively asking for feedback on our service in the form of a simple smile scale (happy, indifferent, sad) and a notes section encouraging feedback. Giving us another touchpoint with customers and closing the loop on continuous improvement of our service. Customers may be indifferent, happy or unhappy to your service, but if you don't encourage communication, then how can you possibly make them do a happy dance?

My Takeaway: Make every encounter with customers count. Give them a unique, memorable experience and demonstrate that you truly care, and you will see the long term benefit. You can only achieve this by creating the space from the 9-5 slog, to think clearly and creatively about the solutions and value you can provide.

My question to you is: How can you make your client do a happy dance this week?

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