How to Take Your Customers from Happy to Wowed

We ran across this article by Stacy Blackman on BNET. We hear a lot about customer service that's just good common sense, but this adds the extra dimension of solid research to back it up. Enjoy!


We’ve all experienced it. The clerk who sees you waiting in the checkout line behind the hundred-coupon customer and motions you over while saying the magic words: “I can help you here.” The restaurant manager who takes a sub-par dish off the bill without being asked. After having one of these experiences, we might have told our friends about it, giving our ultimate seal of approval: “I am definitely going back there.” What we had in these cases was a “wow experience.”

At least, that’s what new Wharton research on providing customers with the utmost satisfaction is calling it. The study identifies five areas that are key to creating a wow experience for your customers:

1. Stay engaged through their whole shopping experience by listening and helping
2. Provide product quality and knowledge
3. Create a consistently positive brand experience
4. Help them expedite time spent shopping
5. Resolve their complaints to complete satisfaction

Unfortunately, one of these five by itself might please customers, but it isn’t going to wow them. In order to go above and beyond, the researchers suggest basing the foundation of your customer service mission on these five principles.

This might sound like a lot of work. How can you hold your customers’ hands through their whole shopping experience, dazzle them with your product knowledge, make them fall in love with your brand and resolve any complaints, all the while getting them out of your establishment in a timely manner?

Certainly a tall task, but according to the research, it’s worth it. If you give your customers the wow experience, four out of five will tell an average of three others about it. For word of mouth like that, the effort you put into creating the wow can easily pay off.