The secret to the success of any organization is giving customer delight to both internal and external customers. Once the leadership delivers the best experience to the people at the highest level of their organization, it cascades down to the people at the frontline and in turn to the external customers. Customer delight is the new business mantra. More and more product investment budgets are being redirected to customer experience innovations. Now, marketing leaders expect to compete primarily based on customer experience.

In the book, Legendary Service: The Key is to CARE, the authors describe this as a CARE model, which is fitting because great customer service hits people at an emotional level and creates a connection.

• C is Committed to customers

• A is Attentiveness

• R is Responsiveness

• E is Empowerment

Thus, when the leadership empowers and gives proper coaching to their people to deliver exemplary service, the customer would become their customers for life, adding to goodwill through word of mouth and taking the organization’s reputation to greater heights which will lead to high performing organizations with higher bottom-lines. As they say, your customer service will determine the future of your company.

One thing which is most important to understand is that excellent customer service is more about attitude than skills. Attitude is more important than experience as experience can be gained but attitude is impossible to change. It is the intangible “WOW” factor that is the difference between good customer service and great customer service. WOW, the factor is the ability to go far beyond what the customer needs and not just cater to their immediate requirements. It lies in surprising and delighting them.

Invest in coaching the employees in Emotional Intelligence so they can empathize with the customers and handle conflict better. The employees should love making people’s day and if this one trait is there in them, the others can be trained. To give the best customer delight, we need to ensure the organization is strong on the following fronts:

Reliability:

The customer should be able to fully rely on the quality of the product or service for an outstanding customer experience.

Availability:

The organization should be contactable on the terms of the customers using any modes like emails, chats, calls, messaging, or portals. Their queries should be resolved satisfactorily in a time-bound manner.

Organizations should also ensure repeat customers or customer retention. They should keep coming back so that it increases your customers’ lifetime value and boosts revenue.

So to summarize, bringing that “WOW” factor in customer service, can ensure customer delight and more customers.