Scale-ups need to delight their customers. But is that enough?
As a scale-up CEO, you are extremely busy. But for the topic of Delighting Customers, you always have time. Everyone seems to agree that delighting customers is important. But is that necessarily true?
Delight is a mixture of joy and surprise that customers feel when their expectations are exceeded. When customers just get what they expected, they are satisfied, but there seems to be nothing to talk about. Only truly delighted customers talk about your company and help to promote your product. For scale-ups, word-of-mouth is an important tool to attract new customers.
“Delight is a mixture of joy and surprise that customers feel when their expectations are exceeded.”
However, providing delight might not be sustainable. It means doing something that people don’t expect, positively surprising them. But do customers want surprises? And can you continue surprising them over and over again? It might be more important to increase customer loyalty by consistently delivering on promises. Otherwise your customers will be disappointed, and the power of word-of-mouth will turn against you.
As a scale-up, you risk overselling. “You want to sell, you’re so eager to sell“, explains a scale-up CEO. “You can’t deliver exactly on the promise, and the disappointment is very near”. Perhaps, as a start-up you could get away “faking it while making it”, but as a scale-up that simply becomes unacceptable.
Then, once you deliver on your promise, the more you know your customers, the better you can spot their needs, even those they are unaware of, and deliver value to them.
So, what do you have to deliver? Your product must be crystal clear. It should be “must have”, not “nice to have” for your customer. You have to be ultra-credible in your delivery, and do so better than anyone else. And your product needs to be meaningful, so touching your customers in their hearts. If you check the box on each of these criteria, you are simply irresistible, as Peter de Boer calls it, and you build loyalty, continued sales, and referrals. Being delightful might be your strategy to win new customers. Being irresistible is a success factor for you to scale.
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Being Irresistible
According to Peter de Boer, creative strategy consultant and founder of Irresistible Branding, to be irresistible, companies need to excel in the delivery of an indispensable, meaningful product. If it succeeds in touching your customers hearts, you build loyalty, continued sales, and referrals.
