Although creating an outstanding customer experience takes a lot of effort, it’s crucial for business success.
For SaaS businesses, it’s particularly important to prioritize that. With the number of competitors you face, it’s easy to lose customers if you don’t provide them with a delightful experience.
But what does it mean to delight your customers?
We’ll answer that question in this article and provide you with valuable practices to achieve and measure customer delight.
What Is Customer Delight
It goes without saying that meeting your customers’ expectations and keeping them satisfied is vital for every business, including SaaS companies. But why not take it a step further?
That step further is what we call customer delight.
Having delighted customers can unlock various benefits for your business, but what does that entail?
Here’s how Stacy Willis, an experienced marketer and content creator, explains it:
In other words, delight doesn’t come with simply meeting your customers’ expectations—those expectations need to be surpassed, creating an overwhelmingly positive experience.
That distinction between customer satisfaction and customer delight is crucial to understand.
Having satisfied customers is great—it’s unlikely they’ll churn unexpectedly, talk negatively about your product, or do anything else that might negatively impact your business.
However, customer delight goes beyond that. Delighted customers are more likely to stay with your business long-term and even actively recommend your product to others.
As Stacy DeBroff, social media strategist and marketer, puts it, delighted customers are loyal customers.
It’s really about giving customers an experience that triggers a burst of brand enthusiasm, which increases affinity and loyalty.
If you want to see how customer delight looks in practice, below is a review of Todoist on the renowned review site G2.
It’s clear that the customer is overjoyed with the product, and the glowing review is a way of showing it.
In a nutshell, that’s what customer delight is—the customer feeling utmost enchantment with the product that has exceeded all of their expectations.
As you can probably tell by now, it’s important to create that feeling. Let’s dive into the reasons why in the next section.
Why Is Customer Delight Important
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who would argue that customers who are delighted with your product or service aren’t beneficial for the business.
However, let’s discuss why that’s so significant.
As we mentioned earlier, when you go above and beyond to exceed your customers’ expectations, you increase the chances of them sticking with you and your product.
In other words, you positively impact customer retention.
And customer retention is essential for SaaS businesses because they rarely operate on a one-time sale model.
Many SaaS businesses provide subscription-based products or services, which allow them to build a steady stream of revenue. That’s what Monday does, for example.
So, by providing your customers with a stellar experience, you increase the chances that they’ll keep using your product and pay for it.
However, increased retention isn’t the only benefit of customer delight. Retention can improve even if you only meet expectations.
What happens if you exceed them is that customers will become loyal, and that brings additional perks to your business.
For example, loyal customers will actively promote your product to their friends, family, and even strangers on social media.
In other words, you don’t have to brag about how great your product is. As Sophia Barron, an expert product marketer, explains, loyal customers will do that for you.
Word-of-mouth marketing that you can get by impressing your customers is worth the effort.
First of all, it’s significantly cheaper than creating and launching an elaborate marketing campaign.
You don’t have to do anything other than make sure that your customers are beyond satisfied, and they’ll gladly spread the word about their experience.
And second of all, it’s powerful.
Many studies have shown that people trust recommendations from their friends and family, but also online recommendations from people they don’t necessarily know.
For instance, a Nielsen report indicates that 92% of people trust word-of-mouth referrals more than all other forms of advertising.
Keeping your customers very happy can, therefore, open more opportunities for business growth thanks to their active role in promoting your product.
To sum up, customer delight is an important factor in customer retention, but it offers numerous other benefits, too.
It can create a base of loyal customers who can be powerful allies in promoting your business.
How to Measure Customer Delight
As we’ve discussed thus far, having delighted customers is undoubtedly beneficial for your company on many levels.
But how can you know if you’re surpassing your customers’ expectations?
There are ways to measure customer satisfaction that can let you know if you’re headed in the right direction.
Let’s examine the most common and useful ones.
Customer Satisfaction Score
If you want to know how satisfied your customer is after interacting with a certain aspect of your product, you can use the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Here’s how Alex Birkett, a content creator specialist, defines this metric:
As you can see in his definition and in our introduction before it, there’s no mention of customer delight, only satisfaction.
As we’ve established earlier, satisfaction and delight are not the same. However, CSAT is helpful because it indicates your customers’ overall satisfaction level.
Once you know how satisfied customers are on average, you also know when you surpass that average. In other words, your CSAT helps you see when you exceed customers’ expectations.
Here is what a CSAT question looks like.
The point is that customers can rate how satisfied they are with the experience of using your product.
With that information, you can see if you’ve exceeded their expectations, as well as which features get better scores, which ones you could improve, and other valuable data that can help you delight your users.
Net Promoter Score
Another way of gauging customer satisfaction is using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Just like CSAT, NPS surveys also consist of one question for the customer, and it’s about how likely it is that they’ll recommend your product to others.
In essence, it usually looks like the one below from Refiner.
As you can see, the customer can choose a number from 0 to 10, representing their likelihood of recommending your product to others.
That scale is an indicator of customer delight. Let’s break it down.
There are three groups of customers depending on the score they give on an NPS survey:
- Detractors (0-6)
- Passives (7-8)
- Promoters (9-10)
The higher the score is, the more satisfied the customer is. When it comes to measuring customer delight, you want to have as many Promoters as you can.
Those are the customers who are delighted with your product. They are very likely to recommend it, get very high value from it, and will most likely stay loyal to you for a long time.
In short, NPS is a good indicator of customer delight and provides you with a clear picture of how many devoted customers you have.
Customer Lifetime Value
Revenue is crucial for every company, and there’s no way around it. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that’s all about revenue, but it’s also a great indicator of customer delight.
To understand what CLV is, let’s look at the definition from Austin Caldwell, a seasoned product and digital marketer.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measure of the total income a business can expect to bring in from a typical customer for as long as that person or account remains a client.
In terms of customer delight, that means that the higher the CLV, the higher the chances that the customer is very happy with your product.
In other words, a high CLV indicates that the customer will stay for a long time, which means they are beyond satisfied with your product.
For SaaS companies, those long-term customers are essential since many of those companies rely on repeat business as their primary source of revenue.
SaaS customers are also often inclined to stay with a single provider. According to data from SaaS Scout, 77% of customers stick with one brand for more than ten years.
If you can be a part of that percentage, your CLV will be high, which means more expected revenue from customers who love to use your product.
How to Achieve Customer Delight
Delighting customers isn’t an easy task.
However, there are proven ways to deliver an exceptional experience that will show them that you’re willing to go above and beyond for their satisfaction.
In this section, we’ll go over three practices you can use to achieve that.
Reward Your Loyal Customers
One of the ways to delight your customers is to show them gratitude for their loyalty.
You can do that by rewarding them for using your products and services.
There’s a variety of ways to do that. You can provide discounts, exclusive offers, access to new features, and even commissions if they help you get more customers, as Evernote does.
The point of rewarding is to offer your loyal customers something they can enjoy apart from the product itself.
That way, you reinforce and deepen your relationships with them by making them feel special.
And if customers feel special because they use a particular product, they’ll continue to use it. Who would look for an alternative if they get rewards and recognition?
That’s not all. As you probably know, loyal and happy customers often spread their satisfaction to others, and most of them will also do that if they get rewarded.
According to The Loyalty Report, 70% of consumers will recommend a brand based on its loyalty program.
To summarize, your loyal customers are already very satisfied with your product—that’s why they’re devoted in the first place.
By rewarding them for that, you create even more delight and minimize the chances of them changing their minds.
Offer Your Customers Self-Service Support
From time to time, your customers have questions about your product, encounter an issue with using it, or simply want to learn more about one of its features.
That’s normal and expected. Now, imagine if there was an easily accessible source of information that they could use in all of those situations.
Wouldn’t that be an outstanding customer experience?
Offering your customers high-quality self-service support is a great way to make them happy.
They can fulfill their needs quickly and efficiently without waiting for customer support representatives or improvising on their own.
You can provide them support like that with a top-notch knowledge base that you can build with Archbee.
Archbee allows you to create user guides, insert instructional videos, write how-to articles, use annotated screenshots of your product, etc.
In short, you can build a versatile knowledge source, filled with helpful materials, that your customers can use when convenient for them.
There’s no doubt that your customers will be delighted with the results.
Act On Feedback From Your Customers
Customers love to be heard. If you ask them for feedback, most will be glad you care for their opinion.
However, asking for feedback might not be enough to delight them.
Anyone can ask for feedback, but what you do with it can make the difference between customer satisfaction and customer delight.
If you want to make your customers feel like they are essential to you and that you care about what they think, you should act on their feedback.
That’s also what Connor Brooke, a content writer and business consultant, advises.
Not acting on feedback can backfire. Sooner or later, you’ll ask your customers for their opinion on your product again.
How motivated do you think they’ll be to provide it if you previously ignored it?
That’s why a simple message can make a big difference to your customers.
Take a look at the example below.
Even if the feedback isn’t perfect, you can significantly improve the relationship with your customer by engaging with them about their opinions.
That will show that you listen to them and care about making your product better, as well as that you want to make them happier.
You certainly won’t be able to implement every idea they present in their feedback, but you can always show appreciation for them.
That’s a surefire way to achieve customer delight.
Conclusion
Impressing customers is challenging, but it’s well worth the effort.
If you want to be at the top, meeting their expectations simply isn’t enough. Sure, they’ll be satisfied and use your product, but for how long?
Until some other company or product does more and delights them.
Don’t let that happen to you. With the help of this article, you can create a delightful customer experience that they won’t forget.
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