WOW your customers

If you’ve ever stayed at a Doubletree, Hilton hotel, then you will appreciate the simple, yet profound experience that I’m about to explain.

I arrive after a long train journey, hot, bothered and a little tired, to be greeted by the front desk lady who pulls out the paper bag from a warming drawer next to her computer. Somewhere around the world that day, about 30,000 warm chocolate-chip-walnut cookies would be pulled out of DoubleTree warming drawers and handed with a smile to distressed travellers just like me.

Each DoubleTree location bakes multiple batches of the tasty frozen dough daily, so they have about three times as many cookies as guests checking in that day, so to cater for those guests who need an extra little ‘pick me up’.

It’s pretty hard for a cookie that’s both warm and free to be bad and almost impossible to not put a smile on your face.

Put aside the cost of ingredients for 30,000 cookies for a moment and focus on the logistics of baking, storing, & disposing of these gooey treats each and every day, surely it would be enough to put any sane business off the idea.

Customer WOW’s are a hot topic in the Outlaw Social HQ at the moment. We have had the pleasure of working with some inspirational luxury brands over the past few months and one of the main themes that has come out of our creative storyboarding sessions has been ‘Real-Time WOWS’.

The opportunity to engage with your customers in real-time, and to give them something to speak about, is in our opinion, one of the most important things you can do for your business and brand in 2019.

One example of this, is a luxury complex that was missing out on the amazing social proof of guests tagging and checking in to their business on Instagram & Facebook. We developed a simple but effective strategy that went as follows:

• Allocate a Real-Time WOW budget for rewarding guests that tagged the brand or checked in to the venue
• Allocate time daily to engage in community management, responding to comments and rewarding live guests that tagged the business in photos, videos or posts.
• As the client had a spa facility, the perfect example of this would be sending a glass of champagne to guests that tagged the facility in a photo in real time and thanking them for sharing their experience.
• Rinse and repeat

A simple strategy, that would take only a small budget, and the commitment of time and consistency. The projected return on investment was extremely positive from a financial and brand equity perspective, as those customers would become raving fans and speak about the personalised experience for years to come.

My question to you is: When was the last time you truly Wowed your customers?