Customer Delight: The key for a lasting business

Customer Delight. Sounds like a silly term doesn’t it?

Let’s start with the basics. What is customer delight?

Customer delight happens when you surprise a customer (or client) by exceeding expectations. When expecations are met, you have customer satisfaction. When expecations are exceeded, you acheive customer delight.

How do you get there? By being human. Listen to your customer and their needs.

Why should you care? Sure, we’re inbound marketing pros, but there is something to be said about word-of-mouth marketing.

If a customer complains or is unhappy with your product or service, don’t be discouraged. If they cared enough to share their feedback, you have been given a great opportunity to better understand what is needed to truly delight your customer base.

How can you achieve customer satisfaction or customer delight?

How do you start? Start from what keeps you in the game. Your customers’ needs. So…

…Always Listen To Your Customers.

The Lean Startup preaches that entrepreneurs need to develop products and test them with real customers in order to build something useful. The same goes for serving your customers and understand their needs. Listen to customer feedback religiously. To this day, I still read every piece of customer feedback sent to our company and I make an effort to share those insights across the company to ensure we are continuously building the right products and features.

Gift Your Customers With Simple Things When They Don’t Expect It.

Uber and Lyft are continually locked in a heated battle for market share. Anyone that uses their services knows the number of unexpected rewards or credits they offer all the time.
They know that one way to a customer’s heart is showing them they care about them more than the bottom line. Therefore surprise your loyal and new customers with little gifts that won’t financially impact your business but will definitely positively impact your customers!

Give Them Some Space

How many times have you been continuously spammed by store or by a forum newsletter? This is really annoying! Isn’t it?
Even if your customer is interested in your products or services, good chances are that they will unsubscribe and get pissed off by your brand. All your campaign expenses and time spent in order to achieve a customer are now thrown out of the window because of your excessive marketing.
Even if you the best intentions in mind, remember that sometimes it’s best to step back and give customers space.

Time Should Be Your Asset

Amazon’s asset is timing and this turned it into a multi-billion dollar company. Now you can understand how important timing is.
In today’s business world, speed is essential. If your company delays in responding to customers, you’re missing a huge opportunity to capture valuable insights and feedback.

Digital Nomad: The quintessential dream job and how to achieve it.

Travelling the world while carrying only your laptop and your essentials, making money with only a wifi connection, schedule your day as you want, and have no deadlines. The benefits of a digital nomad.

What has changed?

The Internet has revolutionized the world we live in. One of the main aspects that saw this change is “work”.

Work can now be done everywhere you have a laptop or a computer, and a decent WiFi connection. That’s it!
No office, no shouting bosses, no traffic jams.. nothing. Just you, your favorite location and a computer connected to the internet.

Businesses are no longer confined to physical boundaries. A working laptop and internet connection can connect you to the rest of the world in an instant. Location-independent entrepreneurs are examples of digital nomads who provide valued services to people from across the world. Anything from accounting, legal transcription, writing, and marketing can be done with their help.

Being a digital nomad yourself is a great way to pay your bills and at the same time use your spare time to good use. You can travel, put time into your hobby and spend quality time with your family as you work remotely.

How can you achieve the freedom of the digital nomad?

You can either choose one of the multiple everyday jobs that can be done from home or you can decide to start your own business
An everyday home-based job can allow you to work from your home, you still have to respect schedules imposed by your boss or whoever commands you.
But if you start a small internet-based business you are your own boss, you decide your own schedules and deadlines.

Digital Nomad, the CEO of yourself. The pillars of freedom.

1 Mindset
Your focus should be devoted to divorcing yourself from the idea of working yourself to death for a gold watch and a pat on the back. Instead, you should abandon a few concepts such as retirement as a holy grail and that absolute income is the most important thing (relative income – i.e., the amount you earn per hour of work – is the most important thing in this book).

2 Automation

The idea is that if you set up being an entrepreneur appropriately, you can create a stream of passive income that permits you to make money with very little effort.

While this is interesting to some people, the truth is that it’s not quite as easy as it seems out to be. It relies heavily on salesmanship (the ability to convince people you have a product that they want) and luck (stumbling into a market). If you have both (and the examples he uses have both), you can do quite well.

But what is the real “secret” to automation? The key to automation is outsourcing.
Through outsourcing, you can delegate some time-heavy tasks. By doing that you will reduce profit margins but there is a consistent gain in terms of free time.

The biggest benefits of working from home are its flexibility, financial savings and health advantages and free time.

Some jobs that can help you become a digital nomad:

E-Commerce
E-commerce started with books and has now expanded to almost everything. From clothes to groceries, electronics to baby care, everything is available to buy through verified e-commerce platforms.

Online Training
Online training is a concept that was frowned upon a few years ago but has gained momentum over the years, with the glory of sites such as Skillshare.com and Lynda.com.

Outsourced Freelancing
Get hired for multiple jobs and simply outsource them to other freelancers. It’s even easier than it sounds.