Last week, on my way to XDay 2022 in Austin, I was surprised by my preferred airline with a picture in the cockpit prior to taking off. This was in celebration of my reaching a life milestone with the airline.
I’ll say that at that very moment, I was delighted. Everything had gone well, from purchasing my ticket to getting through check-in and boarding the plane. Nothing went wrong and I was surprised by getting to do something that I haven’t done since I was twelve years old.
Then came my next trip following XDay. I had a connecting flight so I could stay with my preferred airline o my way to meet a client for dinner. Everything was on a tight schedule. Less than an hour to make my connection, and if that worked out, I needed my next flight to be on time just to barely make it.
Things unraveled upon arriving at the originating airport – a weather-related delay. The connection time window grew tighter and I was certain I would miss my connection given the distance between the arrival gate and my next departure gate.
Once we took off, I checked and I had a ten-minute connection, and I’m long past my ten-minute mile days. Shrugging my shoulders I was still happy to see there was a later flight available. Again, not ideal, but it got me to where I was going.
I fly often enough to know that there was little to be done by the airline. Weather happens, disruption happens, connections get missed. Not terrible, but certainly not something to be delighted about. That is until I landed in my connection city. I was greeted by an airline rep who promptly guided me to an airline cart to take me to my next gate. I will say, that was probably the fastest I’ve ever traveled inside an airport.
Upon arriving at my gate another agent awaited with a printed boarding card and scanned me onto my flight. I made it on time for my flight, my landing and my dinner. I was delighted (again). I was also a little exhausted.
How does Delight actually work?
During XDay, in his opening presentation, Vivek, CEO of QuestionPro, discussed Delight when it comes to customer experience. It doesn’t mean that you have all Promoters across all your customer experience touchpoints as measured by your customer experience software platform.
Quite simply, Delight is a powerful emotion and empirically it is derived from two key ideas:
- A positive experience and
- The Unexpected
With that definition, how can I say I was delighted in both cases? Where one experience went very well and the other was a poster child for why we use closed-loop feedback.
Quite simply, my needs and goals were met and there was that “little something extra” that went above and beyond my expectations. If a gate agent had been rude, no delight. If they had held the plane but made me run all that distance, no delight. If I had arrived late, despite the extra effort, I would have been satisfied, but not delighted.
In that way, delight is difficult to attain. First, you must meet all the customers’ needs. Then you must do something unexpected and surprising that goes above any prior expectations. Only then, can you attain delight, the kind that is worthy of a social media recommendation that will improve your CX Reputation. Otherwise you are just meeting that expectation for what you’ve done previously. It won’t happen every time, but if you’re innovative and you enable your employees, delight is within reach.
But how do you know it’s Delight?
Understanding Delight takes more than just an NPS score and you may not find it simply through a sentiment analysis. The starting point is a good definition of the customer journey, development of a sophisticated Voice-of-the-Customer program on a sophisticated CX Enterprise Software like QuestionPro and tools that fix problems strategically – like Outer Loop.
With our QuestionPro exclusive NPS+, the capture of a root cause really helps our clients to understand where processes go wrong. However, it can also be used to determine the root cause behind a process going well.
You can isolate the department, perhaps even the individual, when someone rates you with a top score. These “delight experiences” can and should be celebrated, perhaps with even more attention than detractors (and by the way, celebrating Delight can enhance the Employee Experience).
If your customer experience strategy is done well, you will know which customers are Delighted. You’ll be able to demonstrate it through your tools and even further through a financial linkage analysis.
It is not simple; the better the understanding, the more difficult it will be to define and calculate. It will also be challenging to create circumstances to put customers into positions to be delighted. It starts with making things right.
QuestionPro offers the most advanced customer experience tools available. Gain valuable insights into your customers’ thoughts and emotions with QuestionPro CX free trial today.
