What is Customer Delight?

Delight is a word in customer success that has been tossed around a lot...but what does it really mean and how do you create a strategy and process for it? The team at Bonjoro decided to dig into this word and concept, and they were able to come up with some very interesting findings.

Join Planhat and the Bonjoro team, Oli Bridge & Matt Barnett, as we discuss their findings on delight and customer success, as well as their suggestions for creating a strategy to incorporate it into your business strategy.

You can also check out the SlideShare here.

Q&A

Q: How do you segment your customers? [What are good ways to determine which customers get which type of outreach and keep it scalable, while still treating every customer with that personal touch]

It’s funny because this is a conversation we’re having internally for our customers because we have some of them with huge customer lists. I think it comes down to how we define personal…

When you’re thinking about personal, there are different levels of personal -- think about it as a pyramid; [at the bottom you have] generic emails...at the very top is taking someone to dinner for a fine porterhouse steak, oysters, and champagne. You need to find out where you fit on that spectrum, where your customers fit, and what makes sense.

Probably what the difference is, is starting to move people up that chain. So, at the bottom where you used to just do mass transactions you can actually now go up a level and work at the same scale. Scale is always getting easier and easier.

So segment them according to your business and…[by the value]. So if you’re a B2B SaaS company, obviously prioritize your gmail and hotmail signups less...Also, for example, if you have an affiliate program that refers customers in, maybe those are the ones you’re going to want to give more love to because you know they’ve come from a referral and they’re more likely to convert anyway as opposed to just google search…

I think the second part to it is also when you’re mapping this stuff out try and think about it from the bottom of that pyramid, and what are the lightweight things I can do?

If we look at the stuff we do; sending a Bonjoro is quite lightweight and it’s really quick - it might take you 30 seconds, putting a GIF on your site or pricing page with someone [from the team] again, very lightweight.

So at the start of the customer journey, when Matt’s saying to treat everybody equally, those things have to be fairly lightweight, but as a customer moves through that journey with you…then you can ramp up the weight of the delightful thing you’re doing for them.

Therefore, it’s a lot about the customer journey; at the start of the customer journey, when you’re looking at activation, make it much more lightweight but adjust where you think it’s appropriate and you need to. And, again, as they move through that customer journey just ramp it up more and more, and you’re going to get more of that advocacy with the delight hitting the right people who are going to become the biggest advocates.

Q: While evaluating Customer Health using different metrics (e.g. login frequency, NPS, number of reported tickets etc) does it make sense to add this subjective metric of Customer Delight, which should be evaluated by the CS manager based on his gut feeling?

Meg: Even the way we do this at Planhat is that we give you this subjecting, what we’re calling, CSM (Customer Success Manager) score that can affect the health score and allows you to weigh into it with your gut feeling. Because sometimes your gut feeling is a pretty good indicator and can tell something that data doesn’t.

What’s your experience with how much that gut feeling can play into the health of a customer?

We’ve had a lot of talk internally, actually, about is there something we can do around designing a delight score? And I don’t think we’re there yet, and I think companies like [Planhat] actually are robust tools, built for CS [that can provide an option for this]. And whether you should be looking to build out your own metric that equals delight for you, I think that’s quite a good idea. Matt, I know, has been formulated some thoughts on this..

I think measuring customer health will get better over time...I’ll be honest that when we dig into it, it kind of still throws us because you’ll see happy customers who will just disappear, and likewise you’ll see unhappy customers who will just bounce back in. And trying to work out [a good health score] around that…

There’s still this human element that I think is hard to track and hard to understand. We have some ideas around it, but the fall back, honestly, is just to talk to customers...Make sure you’re communicating with them regularly so when there are warning flags [you can catch them]. Again, if they have a relationship with you they will bring up those warning flags, they won’t just jump out of nowhere.

I always mention that we use a CRM and they don’t really ever talk to us or engage us even though we’ve been with them for a long time, and I always say that, ultimately, if something better comes up we’ll jump them, we’ll just be gone like that [*snap*]. And we enjoy the product, it’s great and it satisfies all of our needs, but if something else comes up there’s nothing beyond the product to keep me there, and I won’t tell them I’m going I’ll just move. So communication will solve that. Again, scale is the issue but just make sure you’re checking in at certain points.

There’s no magic answer yet, but I think a few companies will solve it together and we’ll pull the results together.

Q: I am a CS/Marketing (basically all-around man) guy in a small startup, with limited budget and time. My question is therefore, what would you guys recommend as one delight activity to focus on?

I’m going to say Bonjoro, right? So say you’re looking to activate customers, what’s a really simple thing you could do? You could set up a Bonjoro to integrate with whatever CRM or marketing automation platform you’re using and when someone signs up, don’t get rid of your usual onboarding stuff, but on top of that, just send them a personal video and say, Hey we value you coming onboard with our business, we’re here if you need x, y, and z…

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the impact that has and the perception it has, especially from the customer’s point of view, on your business. So I’d say something simple like that.

I just want to point out that a lot of it is around perception. When you send a video or you do something that it’s obvious you’ve taken some time, the customer doesn’t [necessarily] care about the video, a video is just a medium, what they care about is that you’ve given them your time.

So, in fact, the thing you’re selling is time when you show someone you actually put time into them in an industry and world where we’re not used to that anymore. That’s the thing that will get you the great results, and then if you look at that and dig into it and think about how much time you need to get [that done with a quick Bonjoro video]...honestly it’s like 20 seconds. It’s not like a phone call because they might take 15 minutes. But one-way communication I actually think is really good because it’s done on their time, it’s done on your time -- you actually have a much smaller input so it saves you [time]. It can mean you have 10 minutes of work to do a day [on this communication and relationship building].

I think one-way messaging pieces that show that you’ve obviously taken sometime and are not automated, that’s where you want to spend your time...but [efficiently of course].

And if you'd like to learn more about how Planhat can help with your customer success goals, you can schedule a time for a demo!