Customer Delight is the next big thing in business growth.

A great product is of course essential, and memorable and effective marketing is a sensible route to awareness, but in a hyper-competitive world (with increasingly low barriers to entry) a systematised and intentional approach to delighting your customers is one of the most effective ways to cut-through and convert more customers.

Customer Delight should not be mixed up with customer satisfaction, which is merely about delivering what your customer expects (studies have shown that 60-80% of “satisfied” customers still don’t make a repurchase with a brand).

Customer Delight is not even about exceeding expectation.

It’s about doing something truly unexpected, that genuinely surprises and delights your customers to the extent that they fully engage with your offer, and advocate for your business once they are converted.

As a simple rule of three, customer delight must be:

- Unexpected

- High value to a specific person

- Generally (but not always personal)

Click here to download our WhitePaper about how to master Customer Delight, and find out exactly how we used this approach to grow Bonjoro 3500% in just 12 months.

But for now, here’s a useful list of the 8 best tools to help delight your customers.

1. Inkpact

A great company with “delight” in its DNA.

Inkpact helps you scale the writing and delivery of handwritten letters. Sure, the product is not new, but that’s half the point - customers will certainly not expect it, and you’ll see greater impact and cut-through versus the thousands of emails cramming their inbox from other companies.

2. Swag.com

Customer Delight isn’t just about gifting, but who doesn’t like swag? Your customers are your biggest marketing channel full stop. What better way to include them in your journey, than to send them personal (and useful) stationery, accessories, and clothing?

Swag make the whole process incredibly simple, and the pricing and service is scalable to any business.

Check out the gnarly socks that Buffer sent to us - lit up our day so much that we did an impromptu photo-shoot!

3. Survicate

You can’t build the right products and experiences if you don’t know your customers. If you know them better, you can create better experiences for them - as simple as that.

Survicate is a great place to start building your customer delight strategy by simply asking them the right questions at the right time. With integrations into Slack and other common CRM and support systems, you'll never miss an important piece of customer feedback again.

4. Bonjoro

Yes, we are biased. But no discussion about Customer Delight would be complete without Bonjoro.

Bonjoro makes it easy to record personal 1-1 videos to delight your customers. Use it to thank new signups, followers, or buyers to increase conversions, boost customer loyalty and generate advocacy for your business. Bonjoro integrates directly with a range of CRMs so you can automatically pull customer emails into the Bonjoro app and record them a video. Their powerful automation rules give you a simple way to define who gets a video, and who in your team needs to send it.

5. Slack

“Slack? How does Slack help you delight customers?”, you might be wondering. Two simple ways:

i) Create a customer feedback channel to keep them front of mind for your whole business. Here at Bonjoro we have a feedback channel dedicated to all happy (and sad) customer feedback. Ensuring everyone in your team or organisation can see this unites you around your customers experiences on a daily basis. This boost in transparency also boosts internal morale. Better employee morale always leads to better customer outcomes.

ii) Invite your customers in. Create channels that are open to customers, investors, or partners. We were recently part of beta testing Revolut’s business banking platform and being part of a private Slack group with other similar businesses created an immense and lasting impression of customer excellence, and we’ve made countless word of mouth referrals not only because the product is outstanding, but because we felt included in the journey. Up against an existing competitor like Transferwise, this helped to differentiate Revolut from the outset and set off a wave of advocacy they are still benefiting from.

6. Pledge 1%

Delighting customers doesn’t have to be things you do for them. It can also be about letting them know that they are working with a company that is ethical and good.

Here at Bonjoro we pledge 1% of our time, and more of our profits, to charity. Sharing this experience with our customers ensures they are included in this process of goodwill and charity. You should check it out - it’s a truly amazing movement.

7. Calendly

I know, this is probably more of a productivity hack, than a delight hack, but seeing as setting up meetings can be one of the least delightful interactions we have with clients and prospects, it could do with a little boost.

Calendly make it easy, not a time drain, for clients and customers to schedule meetings or calls with you. Customer delight is not always about the unexpected - sometimes it’s about elevating those existing moments to a point where they are more frictionless.

8. Giphy

GIFs aren’t just about memes. They’re a chance to elevate the impersonal and banal into something elevated and memorable. I’ll give you two examples of how you should be using GIFs to delight customers.

Email signatures

I have to thank one of our customers Jo Muggeridge for this one. Whilst writing our whitepaper on Customer Delight she sent me an email with a warm and smiley GIF of herself in her email signature. It was so lovely to see her personality resonate instantly in the digital domain. This is what customer delight is all about, looking for seemingly banal moments of your customers interaction with your brand and elevating them in the most unexpected ways.

Live Chat

Here at Bonjoro we’ve started using personal GIFs of each team member within our Live Chat. This helps reduce the barriers between the customers screen and the person sitting behind the chat conversation. We’re seeing more and more companies experiment with this approach, and we think it’s a trend well worth engaging with. Remember, every customer interaction is a chance to create a connection and earn an advocate for life.

With GIFs and everything else at your disposal, you should always be thinking: “How can we elevate their experience beyond the product? How can we invite them into our world? How can we leave them smiling?”

You’ll have to try Bonjoro to meet the whole team, but here’s a sneak peek of Matt our founder in full flow...

Let us know on our Twitter @bonjoroapp if you find any more tools for customer delight and we will update the article :)