"Good afternoon, Ms. Laird!"
I accidentally picked up a sales call from my cellphone provider.
The agent thanked me for 21 years of patronage, then rattled off a list of special offers – each one raising my already astronomical monthly bill.
I didn’t need a second line or home security system.
What I – a loyal customer of more than two decades – wanted was to pay less; especially after I discovered my brother in law was paying less than half of what I did for the same plan.
Would they price match what I could get as a brand new customer somewhere else?
I’ll spare you the gory details. By dinner time that same day, I was a happy new customer of their competitor. Fifty bucks a month richer.
But this isn’t about my cell phone budget. This is a story about delight.
In the beginning, I was delighted with my phone company. I got a cool pink phone and they sent me one of their iconic calendars every year.
This was a company that made the concept of “perks” mainstream.
Twenty one years later I wasn’t delighted tat all.
The only reason I was still overpaying was because “switch phone plans” was one of those emotionally laborious tasks that lingered on my to-do list for years.
And no one is less surprised than me that they didn’t match my price – I know that a national conglomerate selling a commodity service like cellular data isn’t going to go belly up because I switched my plans.
They don’t really care about me and they certainly didn’t love me back.
Even when the win-back department called less than 24 hours after I cancelled my contract. 🙄
You know who does care about their customers?
Small business owners who are acutely aware that losing a customer could actually mean the making rent this month or not.
That’s the difference between a commodity like cell phone data and the bespoke, magical, only-you-can-do-what-you- do work that you offer.
Those big companies aren’t doing a little happy dance when that Stripe notification comes through.
This is the reason why delight is one of the core pillars of the Just Enough Framework – my approach to building a simple, sustainable marketing plan that actually drives sales.
Delight is what keeps your customers coming back and what drives referrals – and isn’t a business built on repeat sales and word of mouth the dream?
For me delight looks like a hand-written postcard in the mail (to remind us that even if we’re running a business on the Internet we’re all real humans) or a custom hat embroidered with an inside joke from our on-going advising sessions.
It means offering my past clients lower prices becauseI want to reward your loyalty and stay in your business alongside you as your grow.
The kinds of thing that a soulless, faceless corporation owned by private equity would NEVER.
But you could.
You don’t need a loyalty department or an iconic calendar to delight your customers.
Little treats are nice, but delight also comes from having a great client experience like a seamless onboarding process.
From delivering on the results you promised.
And actually living the values (like we love our customers!) you profess.