This article is a complete guide that will help any business understand Customer Delight as a core lever of business growth.

It includes a simple definition of customer delight, along with heaps of practical examples and pro tips you can use yourself.

It is written mainly for business owners, founders, and customer success leaders who are tasked with reducing churn, and maximising customer loyalty and advocacy. But if you work in sales or marketing read on, Customer Delight can also play a huge role in driving high-quality referrals and leads into your sales funnel - leads that arrive primed to convert better than any other.

Customer Delight Definition - what is customer delight?

If you're looking for a definition of customer delight, this is it:

“Customer Delight is a systematised and intentional approach to delighting your customers to increase engagement, loyalty, and advocacy”

It should sit across your entire organization, affecting not only how you speak with customers, but how you operate internally. By providing repeatable, but individually customised and unexpected actions to every customer journey, you can make those customers feel special, valued and therefore incredibly loyal.

Let's unpick this a bit more, and look at exactly what customer delight looks like in practice.

Andy Hanselman, one of the leading thinkers on the topic, developed this useful list of ingredients all Customer Delight moments should contain:

🎯 It produces a wow reaction

🎯 It appears spontaneous or unexpected

🎯 It contains a personal touch

🎯 It makes the customer feel valued

🎯 It’s genuine

🎯 It creates a ‘talking point’

When done right, Customer Delight can be the biggest lever for conversion and retention within your business. Powerful customer relationships increase the likelihood not only of an initial sale, but they improve retention and growth via advocacy and word of mouth. When it costs 5 to 25x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, delight becomes even more important. Even Warren Buffett tells us it is the one thing every business must do to succeed.

What’s more, in the face of more established companies, with economies of scale and recognisable brands, it is your best opportunity to stand out, and create advocacy and word of mouth to catapult your business to success.

A systematised approach to Customer Delight is not a flight of fancy. It is real, and achievable, and this article will guide you through developing and implementing your own strategy.

The business impact of Customer Delight

Delighted customers not only stay with you longer, they actively bring you more customers. Let’s consider a simple equation to demonstrate this, using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as our basis. Remember, NPS is a simple measure of a customer’s’ willingness to recommend your product. A 50/100 NPS score means that half of your customers would be willing to recommend you.

Assume only 35% of those customers actively do - that’s 17.5 % more leads, even if they only refer one customer a year. Referred customers have a 13% conversion rate (3x greater than the industry average), 37% higher retention rate, and a lifetime value of 16% more than the average customer.

Now consider that 5% of your advocates refer 11 or more leads, and a small percentage of your true influencer’s will bring you 100’s to 1000’s of referrals (depending on business model), then the impact to your bottom line starts to reach 10 - 20% pretty quickly.

For example if you increase your NPS score from 25 - 50, you’ll double the referred leads that enter your business. In fact, here at Bonjoro, 50% of our entire revenue growth comes from advocacy (N.B. our NPS is 75).

Why Customer Delight matters (and why now more than ever)

Now is a pivotal moment in the history of how we do business. We are stuck at a juncture between automation and human relationships. It’s easy to think that the future is written, and more business activities will become automated and impersonal.

This is wrong.

Here at Bonjoro, we live by a different ethos:

"Automate processes but NEVER relationships"

Personal, and relationship driven, approaches matter more than ever. There’s nothing wrong with using technology to your advantage, but it shouldn’t get in the way of your most important duty, spending time connecting with (and delighting) customers.

Here are a few of the many reasons to consider a personal approach again.

1. Growth hacking methods are becoming less effective, and customers are tired of them.

Across the board ‘organic’ reach, generated through so many used and abused ‘growth hacking’ methods is becoming redundant. Andrew Chen calls this “The Law of Shitty Click-Throughs”.

These methods are frequently transient, and very often ineffective and frustrating for late adopters. When you are using other people’s channels and media, eventually it always becomes a ‘pay to play’ dynamic and these channels eventually erode. Remember, in the past few years Facebook has consistently eroded how often business pages will appear in news-feeds, meaning organic reach in Facebook is now negligible.

Customer Delight is often free, and never gets old. It is a simple and humane way of growing your business that can never be exhausted.

2. Competition is more fierce than ever.

Low interest rates and low required capital expenditure to set up business has affected an explosion in the number of small businesses across the world. SMEs now make up 98% of business activity in the USA. In the UK there are over 5.7 million small and medium sized businesses alone. These trends, having worked in our favour, have now created an intense and competitive environment where 8 in 10 new businesses fail and go out of business.

Customer Delight is the key to differentiating yourself, and fostering more significant and rewarding relationships with your own customers

3. Social networks, and the way we use them to interact on a daily basis are eroding our social fabric and our business relationships.

We are becoming ever more connected, but ever more disconnected from those people, that matter to us. Auto-following people on twitter, and pumping out generic welcome messages, whilst novel at first, is simply not acceptable or effective now. People want to do business with people not computers. Even ex Facebook executives like Sean Parker, and Chamath Palihapitaya are now speaking out about the growth methods and psychological principles they abused to create dependencies amongst their users.

Customer Delight is about rebuilding this fabric through real and daily interactions with your businesses customers.

The psychological principles of Customer Delight

(N.B. We re-use this section in our Ultimate Guide to Personalized Video, as the exact same principles apply. If you've read that you will be familiar with the science discussed here)

Customer Delight is grounded in science.

There are clear and definable reasons why some methods of customer interaction work, and why others are less effective.

The starting point for delighting customers often starts with personalisation, and personalisation is effective largely because of one shared human physiological mechanism, the Reticular Activating System (RAS).

In scientific terms the RAS is:

"a network of neurons located in the brain stem that project anteriorly to the hypothalamus to mediate behavior, as well as both posteriorly to the thalamus and directly to the cortex for activation of awake, desynchronized cortical EEG patterns.”

In everyday language your RAS acts as a gateway to your conscious brain. It filters for information that you should pay attention to, helping you control the constant flow of signals reaching your senses in any given moment. When people talk about “selective hearing” they are really referencing the very real physical effects of the RAS that is causing you to ignore some of the information being shared with you.

Erik Daveney describes it as the “cocktail party effect”:

“If you’re at a party with dozens of people chatting, you’ll find that you can easily tune out of those conversations. They’re background noise. But, as soon as someone says something that is of particular interest to you, you will magically tune into that specific conversation.”

Dale Carnegie noticed this effect, and references it explicitly in his seminal work, How to Make Friends and Influence People. He realised that using a person’s name is a simple, but enormously powerful, way of gaining their attention and trust. This is why personalised marketing is so much more effective than mass marketing (studies have shown it can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by a minimum of 10%), and why it is always such a hot topic.

The rise of Account Based Marketing gives more credence to the rising importance of personalised approaches to your customers, that goes far beyond using machines to deliver automated messages based on known data. Customers have become savvy to these efforts (think ad retargeting, FNAME email marketing, even newer solutions offering dynamic landing page copy based by cross referencing a customers’ IP address with AI driven databases), and whilst there is a space for these tactics in any businesses toolkit, nothing replaces the feeling of genuine 1-1 communication. Perhaps more importantly, there is value in someone’s time, and knowing that a business has spent their time on you personally means you are more likely to reciprocate and spend time back.

Acknowledging the presence of the RAS is the key to understanding how to get the proper attention of your customers, and surprising and delighting them. Our company Bonjoro is built around this principle, giving our customers the tools to connect with customers on a 1-1 basis. By naming each customer and speaking directly to them and addressing their business objectives, Bonjoro helps companies ensure every customer feels valued on an individual level from Day 1. Our automation rules make this highly personal approach as efficient and scalable as possible for companies of any size.

Putting in place a systematised and intentional approach to customer delight is the simplest way to capitalise on this simple human trait, and achieve cut-through that elevates your business relationships to a level that significantly impacts business growth through increased conversion, retention and advocacy.

Inspiring examples of Customer Delight

These three examples of Customer Delight show how embedding Customer Delight into the foundations of your business strategy can have lasting and deep effects on a customers perception of your brand.

Zappos

If you look at one company for inspiration, look at Zappos. Their tales of customer delight affecting customer growth and retention are legendary, and show the sheer power of looking past mere customer satisfaction and towards a much greater reading of delightful experiences.

One of the best examples is the now infamous story of Zappos expediting a pair of shoes to a best man the day before his friend’s wedding, after UPS routed the original package to the wrong location. This was not simply customer service done right, this was the result of a systematised approach to customer delight - Zappos has a policy that encourages employees to use their own discretion to make customers happy. This results in a personal 1-1 relationship with customers, where each customer is treated as unique and human.

Suja Juice

Suja is another example of a company that prizes delight at every corner. The juice market is a fiercely competitive market because barriers to entry are fairly low, but Suja has outperformed the rest. Just last year they used social listening to identify customers who were having a bad day, sending them a juice to brighten it up. Their approach to this was super-ingenious. They searched on Instagram for hashtags like #sick #mondayblues #mondays #hungover #butfirstcoffee #isitfridayyet #gradschool #momlife #momprobs #lackofsleep #mood, and sent over 6000 bottles out.

It was a small touch, but the impact was exponential. What I love about their approach is that they went beyond their customer's typical "buying" journey, and thought more deeply about where they could make an impact. This example clearly includes all of the ingredients for customer delight we noted earlier in the e-Book.

Netflix

Employees at Netflix are given the licence from the top down to do things differently. A recently leaked chat transcript shows that this approach infuses the entire organisation with creativity. The beauty of this example is that is takes the cultural essence of the company and elevates it to new heights in the most authentic and personal way possible.

Uberconference

Hold music is boring right? Well, it turns out not always. Uberconference took something simple and seemingly banal and created a delightful experience for every customer by composing their own parody hold music. A retention tool, word of mouth multiplier, and PR gold wrapped into one unique and creative approach to a previously frustrating and dull customer moment.

Listen to the music here on Soundcloud. It really puts a smile on your face. So, so good!!

Customer Delight tactics from 21 leading businesses and entrepreneurs

“Your number one goal should always be to delight your customer. Through your product, yes - but even more so, through their experience with you and your brand." Pat Flynn, Smart Passive income - Entrepreneur and online business coach

In the course of writing this guide we reached out to customers and partners to get their view on customer delight. We asked the following simple question:

Q. “What’s the most delightful thing you do for your customers? And what effect has it had on your business growth?”

The responses are enlightening, and show the differing interpretations of customer delight, and how it is still a relatively immature concept without a single, unified definition. Some approaches are more systematised, and some are more free-form. Technology startups and SaaS businesses in general seem to have the clearest strategies in place that go beyond traditional interpretations of customer satisfaction, towards an intentional and ingrained approach to customer delight as a lever for retention and growth. All companies appear united on one point, namely that treating customers as humans, and interacting on a 1-1 (rather than an automated) level is paramount.

Russ Perry - Founder of Design Pickle and Warrior Certified Trainer

We delight customers by simply doing what we say we’re going to do. I know this is overly simplified but in the services space, too many times brands over promise and under deliver. I know this first hand because I did it for 8+ years as a “traditional” creative agency. Today – we keep things simple in our brand and our brand promise. Then, we work our tails off to deliver – and when possible – over deliver on the service we provide. I can’t think of a better, more influential strategy we’ve had to generate long-term (3+ year) clients and countless referrals.

Huckletree, One of London’s fastest growing coworking communities built for entrepreneurs, startups, bigger businesses and agencies

We pay very close attention to our community and like to surprise and delight our members with small personalised gifts. We call these random acts of kindness, but they really aren’t random at all! It’s important to us personally and professionally to show our members that we really get them and understand what they might like or need. From bespoke branded cycling caps for our resident bike lovers to a weekend survival pack for a team working round the clock, no two gifts are ever alike! Our purpose as a team is to delight our members every day, from smaller interactions to the big stuff. In turn, the personal attention each member receives really impacts our retention rate. Members often say that they want to be part of the Huckletree community because of our amazing team and the level of care and attention they get from us.

Zapier - Zapier moves information between web apps automatically, so users can focus on their most important work

Everyone at Zapier, including executives, contributes to helping customers during an “All Hands Support” shift each week. This helps us delight our customers by providing better and faster support while ensuring that everyone at Zapier understands the struggles our customers encounter when using our product. Through this approach, we can support more customers to continue growing our business and keep people happy.

Business Blueprint, Dale Beaumont, Entrepreneur - Dale is the founder and CEO of Business Blueprint®, the leading business education company in Australia.

From the very start of our business (10 years) every person that has become a client fills out an application form. We ask for all of the essential details, however we also ask for a seemingly innocent question which is [DOB]. Naturally, people fill the form out and think nothing of it, however, as you might guess several weeks or months later, we have a rule in our CRM system to notify us five days before their birthday. This gives us time to write a handwritten card and to grab one of the many gifts that we have and send it to them in the mail. This has had a very positive effect in terms of customers being surprised and delighted. We have received hundreds of emails of thanks and many people have taken it to social media to express gratitude which creates even more exposure.

Buffer - Social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive social media results.

From sending thoughtful gifts (we even tried to send Buffer pizza once) to using GIFs of team members in celebration emails, we try to be as open and give as much personal attention as possible. I think it’s that openness and transparency about what is happening in the company that delights our customers and community the most. They feel a connection to us and while it’s just anecdotal, I’ve seen several people say that they continue paying for our apps because they want to support our mission.

Karolis Vanagas - Partnerships Manager at Zest.is, a Knowledge-Building Platform For Marketers

For the first year and even longer, every user who suggested content on Zest was reached out to personally by Yam or one of us on the team to be informed about the status of their suggestions. While it was time-consuming, it truly helped us feel the heartbeat of the community tweak the product market fit and generate tons of long-term benefits.

We built personal connections with the community members that are now at the core of our multi-level community moderation, established a user advisory board, and generated a ton of word of mouth.

Strictly Savvy, Jo Muggeridge - Founder and MD of Strictly Savvy, a New Zealand based agency offering virtual assistants and creative services to help businesses free up time

We have a really personal and people orientated service, we intimately know their businesses and for many their personal lives too. Because of this we love to do unexpected things - drop in on them with a treat, send them a real-life card in the real-life post just because we think they’re awesome, remember their coffee order and get one on the way to seeing them, or take them out for an impromptu lunch. It’s the unexpected things that make the biggest impact!

Alex & Mario - Co-founders Spriggy - Australia’s fastest growing financial education product

We work with Australian families to build a product that parents and kids love. From the very beginning, the Spriggy team has worked out of the kitchens and living rooms of our first families, we were even invited to one of our Spriggy families’ birthday parties! As we’ve grown, we’ve attempted to embed this sense of collaboration and familiarity into how we operate. Our families are able to vote on features and contribute to product development through our “Spriggy Labs” program, and the entire team contributes to customer comms and support. This allows our families to feel as though they know the people behind the product and helps the team better understand the nuances of the challenges encountered by our families.

Paperform.co, Diony McPherson - Co-founder of Paperform, Diony specialises in web content and product development.

The most delightful thing we do for our customers is simply treating them as human beings. It sounds obvious, but since day one of launching we’ve made a point of always having direct contact with customers and really listening to what they want, no matter how busy we are as founders. We don’t allow a virtual space to de-humanize people - we speak to them as though they were in the room with us. If they make a request we either seriously consider it and add it to our feature plans, or we are very honest (and polite!) about why we won’t introduce it. Our growth has significantly increased based on word of mouth - we have champions that tell everyone and anyone about us. We spent under $500USD/month on marketing in our first year, and have still grown our MRR 20% month on month. It’s core to our brand to have integrity in our customer relationships - we believe it should be the norm to treat customers with respect.

Patreon - A membership platform that makes it easy for artists and creators to get paid

We think that the most delightful thing we do for creators on Patreon is approach every decision with a creator-first mindset. This is an internal core behavior for our team and it also informs our product direction. We routinely ask ourselves “what’s best for creators?” and we believe this is why the vast majority of creators on Patreon are referred by other creators.

Luria Petrucci - Livestreaming expert & entrepreneur

From spending 30 minutes a day in free Facebook groups just helping random people out and answering questions about LIVE video without expecting anything in return...to creating Bonjoros when they sign up... to randomly popping onto my students LIVE streams and participating in THEIR audience’s conversations (which is NOT part of my service offerings)... all of it is unexpected and delights and excites them! People tend to become extremely loyal customers quickly around here because they know they’re not just “another customer” to us. And because of that, they’re out there spreading my message better and more quickly than I ever could. They know they have a family and a safe place where they get encouraged and uplifted, and they want their friends to experience that as well!

Human Scale Business, Dave Bayless - Business innovation expert, Dave helps people innovate in their own businesses

We work hard to be generous with our time and help connect people with relevant expertise and business capabilities – whether or not they are prospective clients. By leading with value, we hope to engender faith that we have our constituents’ best interests at heart. Because we help our clients identify and evaluate strategic options, their trust in us is absolutely essential. Building a relationship is nothing less than a prerequisite to growth.

Advocately, Patrick Barnes - Founder and CEO - Simple software for advocate marketing. Helping B2B SaaS companies get more 5 star reviews and customer referrals.

The number one thing Advocately does to delight our customers is make sure we help them achieve their desired outcomes with our product - a continual stream of new 5 star reviews every week. During our free trial, we will personally get on a call with customers and help them set everything up properly. We have customers all over the world and they all get to work with us during their business hours. For example, no Advocately customers or people on trial for Advocately ever have to get on a call at 9:30pm their time due to us being in a different geography. In additon we have super fast response times to any questions they have, and proactively get in touch with customers if we notice their results with Advocately start to decline. We know there is an opportunity to do better before our customer does. Due to all of this, our customer retention is extremely high. Retention is the key to growth!

ConvertKit - The leading Email marketing platform for professional bloggers

We love to connect with our customers through video, and Bonjoro is a huge part of our strategy! It’s incredible for them to see and HEAR someone reach out to them personally in an ever-more automated world. We also love to send t-shirts, gifts, and handwritten cards to our customers. It’s the little things that turn customers into raving fans, and Bonjoro is a great way to do that!

Kim Doyal - WordPress specialised marketing consultancy. Advice, instruction, and podcasting for online entrepreneurs

The most delightful thing I do for my customers is simply to care about them. We all want to know that we matter. Regardless of where someone is at in their journey, they want to know they’re not alone and their dreams are worth pursuing. To quote Gary Vaynerchuk, “doing the right thing is always the right thing.” This has instilled massive patience in me as an entrepreneur and has created a compound effect in my business. When people feel appreciated and valued they tell everyone. As much as I love automation, you can’t apply it to relationships.

Dee Greene, Entrepreneur - Dee is the founder of media agency D&G Media Services

The most delightful thing I do for my customers is truly caring for and about them. So many agencies are just after a cheque. Ever since I started really showing (and not just saying) that I cared about my clients and getting them results, everything has gotten so much easier and ran so much smoother. My business is growing more than ever and now people are coming to me because word spreads fast about people that have a good reputation with those they work with.

Reply.io - Inbound and outbound sales automation and email prospecting platform that helps sales teams put outreach on autopilot, while still keeping it personal

The most important (and, I hope, the most delightful) thing we do for our customers is that we listen - very carefully! - to what they say. We listen to our clients when they submit feature requests and when they ask for support. We do this no matter if they have a little or a lot to say. We pay attention to what they’re telling us every time we connect, and try our best to make their wishes and requests come true. That is, I think, the best that we can do for our customers. This has helped us grow our business in so many ways - most product reviews out there generating new leads highlight employee-to-customer communication as one of our greatest strengths and competitive advantages. Good relationships with customers and them feeling they are heard also stimulates word of mouth and mentions all over the internet. Ultimately, listening to our customers is a significant driver of customer retention, which is one of the key paths to business growth.

Andy Johnson, Bromford - A social enterprise providing affordable housing and specialist support services

Using a unique and visionary coaching approach we are now investing more dedicated time than ever before to get to know each and every customer, encouraging and enabling them to use their home as a springboard to achieve personal goals and aspirations. We make sure that we’re regularly collecting customer feedback and use this to understand what’s working and where we might need to do things differently, and bring some of these customer stories to life through videos and blogs which are shared through our social channels.

Zenkit, Siobhan O’Rorke, Mkt Manager - Fast growing platform for collaboration and project management

We listen to them! We wouldn’t have the product we do without the feedback shared with us by thousands of users. We also love getting feature requests and if someone has a great idea then we build it into Zenkit when we can. If we’re not able to do so, we take care to explain why not and offer some alternatives. I can say that it absolutely helps with customer retention – when handled well, you can turn a complaint into a happy advocate. When customers feel they can trust you, they are happy to share your product with their team, friends, and family. Building trust with our customers is also really motivational for our team, since we better understand how our actions impact their experiences.

ONTRAPORT - Business automation software that specializes in assisting small businesses & entrepreneurs

As an organization we do things a bit differently - all of our feature additions are free value adds for our customers - not costly adds ons. We also send out a physical copy of our magazine (Modern ONTRApreneur) to all new and existing customers every quarter. It features interviews with some of the best minds in marketing and entrepreneurship out there, campaign maps, and cutting edge strategies. Our newest initiative (and my personal favorite) is what we’re calling “ONTRAlove Letters” - Twice a year, our team members get together and optionally choose the clients they’ve really connected with. We then set aside some time and each hand write letters to our chosen people and drop them in the mail. We truly are lucky to work with such an amazing group of people it makes serving and delighting our crowd easy. This has resulted in amazing relationships with our customers and ONTRAPORT Evangelists popping up around the world.

Chuck Odom - Business advisory and consulting services

Personalized videos with Bonjoro and Handwritten Cards with Feltapp. The combination of video and written messages adds the personal touch and interactions lost in many business relationships. These two services have greatly changed how I let customers know I appreciate them, thinking of them or reaching out to engage in new services. The feedback I’ve received from these two services has been amazing!

How Bonjoro grew 3500% in 1 year through Customer Delight

While building our first company, Verbate, a platform for gathering mobile-video surveys from customers, we started sending videos to personally welcome and thank new signups. Almost overnight we tripled our response rates vs. automated emails. We continued to test the power of personal video and realized its enormous implications for business growth and customer retention. Bonjoro was born.

Less than four years later we are used by thousands of companies across the world who believe that connecting with customers personally is the best way to scale and strengthen business relationships.

And we haven’t stopped there - we try to imbue every customer interaction with delight, and constantly experiment with new ideas.

Here’s just a handful of delightful things we do for our customers that might give you some inspiration. They fit our product, and align well with our internal culture. This is the key to unlocking delight - to align your approach with your internal business culture so your customers see your most authentic self.

It’s worth noting here that customer delight doesn’t require “training”: you just need to give your employees the license to be themselves.

1. Sending onesies to our favourite customers (and their children)

At Bonjoro, we try to actively include our customers in what it feels like to be part of Bonjoro. In practice this can mean any number of things, but the key is thinking about the right moments to invite them in. One way we do this at Bonjoro is to send each customer who hits 500 Bonjoros a bear onesie. If they are already using and loving our product so much it’s likely that they share our values. So we make them part of the family. The sleuth gets bigger, our customers get happier, the product gets busier, and we all benefit. See Alison from Highrise in hers here.

2. Songs to our new customers

Check out our skills here - a couple of sweet voices in there

This is a bit zany, but it shows that we are ALWAYS thinking about our customers. Even if we’re off camping as a team in the middle of nowhere, if the right energy and emotion is happening amongst the group we think about inviting our customers in. On a recent trip this turned into recording musical Bonjoros for our new signups. They key here is that we aren’t afraid to treat customers as humans, and we aren’t afraid to let them see our flaws and blemishes. Business growth comes when you take that customer relationship from 1-1000, and this can happen in all manner of ways, including singing to them!

3. Mime-Bonjoros:

Continuing the musical theme, our intern (and now Marketing Assistant) Amy, took this approach and blended it beautifully with her social media strategy. We didn’t ask Amy to do this, but she felt empowered by the culture of creativity we foster to just have fun, and see where this took her. The result has been a constant stream of engagement from customers and partners who receive one of Amy’s ‘mime-Bonjoros’.

4. Personal gifs in Live Chat situations

More recently we have 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. You should always be thinking: “How can we elevate their experience beyond the product, invite them into our world, and leave them smiling?”

5. An absolute focus on turning customers into friends

We’d have a beer or coffee with every single one of our customers, and we have already done so with many of them. We can attribute the vast majority of our growth to the fact that every team member will go that extra mile for any person, not just because they are a lead or customer, but because they are a fellow human being. Our NPS is currently hovering around 75, meaning that most of our customers would go out of their way to recommend us to others - and a huge number of them do. We have amazing advocates, some who bring us a single wonderful customer, some who bring us hundreds. We even have customers who have become investors because they share our vision so deeply - and without all of them we wouldn’t be here. We call this turning customers into friends, as we believe that you should treat both friends and customer alike - be there to help, to laugh, to hang out and never take one another too seriously.

Defining your own approach (including Customer Delight checklist and 7-point plan)

Customer Delight.

You might read those two words and think the concept a truism, inasmuch as every company wants to make their customers happy.

You might also wonder whether it’s possible to gauge, measure, and actively influence your customers experience beyond how they interact with your product. The case studies above prove you can. This is how to get started.

1) Read and keep this checklist

Andy Hanselman, developed great list of ingredients, all Customer Delight moments must have. These should be your guide to ensuring your moments are in fact delightful. You don’t need to hit all of these markers every time, but try and hit at least four.

It produces a wow reaction.

It appears spontaneous or unexpected.

It has a personal touch.

It makes the customer feel valued.

It’s genuine.

It creates a ‘talking point’.

2) Jump right in (with our 7 point plan)

Getting started is always the hardest part, but think about this…

“Neuroscience research suggests that people act their way into believing rather than thinking their way into acting.”(source)

So often action comes before motivation, and just getting started with one or two of the activities below will set you on the right path, and the feedback you get from customers will reassure you that you are doing the right thing.

To create an approach that aligns with your culture, here’s our 7 point plan to getting started with Customer Delight:

1. Identify your key customer moments. Map their journey on a sheet of paper and look for opportune moments to add a personal touch vs. your usual automated touchpoints.

2. Take time to define your own values - these will define the limits and direction of your approach to customer delight. Our recent guest post about defining business culture is a good place to start here.

3. Begin to test some of your ideas at those key customer moments. See our 8 best tools for delighting your customers if you are unsure where to start.

4. Share your successes internally. Pro tip: create a Slack channel dedicated to customer feedback that your entire company or team has access to.

5. Continue to refine these activities and bring customers closer to your organisation. Always take time out as a team to discuss the things customers have loved, and let this energy feed future efforts.

6. Measure. NPS is a simple measure that will demonstrate the effect of your efforts. Bonjoro is working on a better measure that we will share very soon, but for now NPS will do. Anything below 70, and you still have a way to go ;)

7. Most importantly have fun, and revel in your customers’ delight.

If you get it right, growth and sustainable success await you.

Delight your own customers with personal videos

Bonjoro is on a mission to help every company in the world scale delightful 1-1 relationships with their customers via personal video. Sign up here for a Free and unlimited 14 Day Trial