The ahs and ows

- You know there's a classic phrase. You want to surprise and delight your customer. We don't think so. We think you want to delight your customer. And delight has certain element of predictability to it. The customer is going to come in and get what you promised and what the customer expects, and get it every time. Now, delight has two elements, right. One is, what's the customer's experience. And the other element is. How well did you deliver it? So there's an experiential quality and there's a technical excellence quality to that. And when you deliver both you create kind of an Ah Moment. And that Ah Moment is the moment when the customer surrenders. The customer says, Ah I'm in good hands, I trust you. I know what I'm getting I'm getting what I know, we're great. I first heard about this from some people at the Hyatt Hotel chain who were talking about the Ah Moment that they had. They imagined their business customer coming after a horrific flight or a long day of meetings. Coming into the hotel, checking in going to the elevator, going upstairs putting the card in, opening the door. Picking up the suitcase, throwing it on the bed while the door closes behind them, and they go Ah. That Ah moment is what great service design tries to create. Now an interesting thing, is that Ah Moments can be accompanied by Ow Moments. - Ow Moments, as the name would suggest are painful for both you and your customer because you have done something that is causing your customer some kind of problem. And it is the type of thing that makes your customer withdraw from you, possibly permanently. And the great thing about Ow Moments though is they are opportunities to turn into Ah Moments. When you think about it, any Ow Moment can kind of be reversed to turn into an Ah Moment. One company that we wrote about in the book is Mobile Mini, which provides mobile storage. They realized that a real pain point for their customers was they were not picking up the equipment when the customer was done with it. They were picking up the equipment when they needed it to bring to the next customer. That was a pain point for customers. Now the thing is, Mobile Mini was good enough that they cold get away with it a little bit with their customers. But it really was something that bothered customers. But when they realized that and found out that this was an Ow they had the opportunity to turn that into the Ah. - So what you need to think about is you need to be thinking about three different kinds of ways of listening to the customer. One is sort of persistent, constant, obligato of surveys and checking your social media social listing, other kinds of things to just see what's going on out there. The second thing you want to do is you wasn't to take periodic deeper dives into various areas. Once a month, once a quarter go deeper into a topic area and really open it up a little bit. And the third, is you want to go pulsed. You want to go deep down, you want to have focus groups diagonal slice of customers a diagonal slice of your organization so that you can really go deep in to understand the sort of, hidden points of satisfaction and hidden points of dissatisfaction that you're getting. - And the companies that do a great job both in proactively delivering Ahs and turning Ows into Ahs are what we like to call the Wizards of Ahs. They're the companies that recognize what you need to do consistently, reliably repeatably and scalably to delight customers. And you see it in businesses of all kinds. You see it in B2B, you see it in B2C. Maybe it's at Warby Parker when you get those five pairs of glasses at home that they'll send you so you can try on frames at home. And you put on that frame. The forth frame out of the five and you go oh, this is great. You take a picture, you put it on Facebook and your friends go, those are the glasses. Ah, I'm so glad I used Warby Parker. These are the kinds of moments that the Wizards of Ahs excel at. One of the things that these companies know and really practice, is an understanding of who their customer is. And that is really about who is the right customer for them. The customer is always right only provided it's the right customer for you. So these companies not only know what they do well but they know who the customer is that makes sense for them to do it well for. - A study by Walker Information, Indiana Consulting Firm talked to B2B marketing executives and asked them what was most important to their clients. 50% said that customer experience was most important. 16% said price was most important. I mean, that's how important customer experience is. It trumps price, by more than three to one.