The Key to Customer Experience is Helping People Make & Share Positive Memories
Is what you offer memorable? Make sure it is!
It’s been a while since the buzz erupted around the concept of delighting customers, but it’s something I still believe in. For one thing, modern consumers have access to a huge array of options and the choices they make when selecting goods and services are often based on purely emotional reactions. Even when the value propositions are couched in function or utility, emotional experiences reign supreme.
Out-of-the-ordinary experiences tend to be the most memorable and are the fuel of word-of-mouth promotion. By extension the benefits of the most emotionally engaging products (think Apple or Xbox) and services (think AirBnB or Amazon) are amplified by legions of devoted fans. They have enthusiastic communities that self-organize around their offerings as they share and bond over their experiences.
When people enjoy activities they see as exciting or out of the ordinary, people develop stronger bonds with one another. In the same sense, companies can keep the spark in their client relationships alive by focusing on customer retention through thrilling tactics. — Entertainment CMS
I started thinking about this after seeing a recent episode of The Profit, a transformational reality tv show guided by serial entrepreneur Marcus Lemonis. This is not The Apprentice. It’s warm, fuzzy, and inspiring, but full of the kind of human drama that characterizes business enterprise. Marcus is the perfect mentor, full of candor and tough love, but also cognizant of a business’ potential and how to nurture it.
In a recent episode, I was charmed that they were re-booting an institution from my childhood. Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour & Restaurant was an enchanting experience that I wasn’t ever expecting. Since I only went there a few times, often on my birthday, the pandemonium they would create on my behalf made me feel so special. Sometimes my parents took me there when they had screwed up, like the time I was almost killed by a falling bookcase. It was a bit of quasi-Victorian magic I have never forgotten. ‘We want them to have the birthday of their life’ is their credo. Forty years later I still get warm fuzzies thinking about those experiences, so they are clearly doing something right.
‘This is a business that creates lifetime memories. That’s the kind of business to invest in. — Marcus Limonis
Why Emotional Connections Matter to Memory
The Elements of Value Pyramid illustrates how consumers perceive the benefits of products and services that are available to them. There are several elements that demonstrate the allure of novel and life-changing experiences. The emotional and life-changing layers are indicative of personal change associated with offerings that truly resonate. Such resonance is the magnetism and stickiness that keeps people coming back with the hope of re-creating pleasurable experiences that have stuck in their memories.
We have identified 30 “elements of value” — fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. — Harvard Business Review
Creating Emotional Connections and Lifelong Memories
Not everyone is in a purely experiential business, but this sort of emotional engagement works in a wide range of businesses and organizations,
People don’t actually buy products and services. We buy experiences that leave lasting memories. Exposure to something new and unfamiliar increases the release of dopamine in the brain. Novelty motivates people to expect pleasure.- Shayla Price
What is delight really about? Surprise. Novelty. Wonder. The unexpected. Deviating from business as usual and injecting awe, a visceral emotion reaction, into the customer journey. Novelty and surprise fuel the pleasure-seeking reward centers of our brain, which is exactly the opposite of evoking a stress response due to poor product or service experience. The brain chemicals matter when it comes to making memories. These are also the sorts of experiences (positive or negative) that people are prone to share. Delighted and disgruntled customers are similar in this regard: their memories are something they feel compelled to talk about and they affect all future interactions with that business.
How do memories develop and stick with us? It’s about responding to latent human needs for novelty and surprise, the cornerstones of delight.
According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), surprise and delight is among the most effective marketing tools because it plays to some very basic truths about human nature. For one, the source asserted that surprise is addictive, as shown in a study by scientists at Emory University and Baylor University. Dr. Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor, said that results show people are “designed to crave the unexpected.” — Entertainment CMS
Can Memorable Experiences be Measured and Tracked?
We know that meeting customer expectations is key to satisfaction. Positive customer satisfaction scores predict a 3–10x proclivity to continue to do business with a product or service provider. Customer satisfaction means that their expectations have been consistently met. But true customer satisfaction over time means their expectations are regularly exceeded. This is where delight comes in.
As a KPI (key performance indicator), delight is hard to quantify and measure. For one thing, the effects associated with delight are not always clear: delighted consumers are engaged over the long-term and many of their activities involve advocacy and promotion that might not be easy to track. It’s important to remember, however, that delight only works as a strategy when other customer expectations, related to quality, service, etc. have also been met. Then delight functions like a fuel rocket, propelling a business into the glorious territory of customer fandom and evangelism. That means a business has inspired its customers to become brand-affirming advocates who share the stories of how their favorite products and services have impacted them.
Customer delight is surprising a customer by exceeding his or her expectations and thus creating a positive emotional reaction. This emotional reaction leads to word of mouth. — Wikipedia
In that respect, your best bet is to track social sharing, advocacy, and engagement behavior over time. Your KPIs can be focused both on customer retention/loyalty metrics and also on how much people talk about the experiential aspects of your brand. Why should a product or service be purchased, not simply based on utility, but on the memorable emotional resonance it fosters?
How to Cultivate Memory-Making Experiences
Some questions to consider:
- Is what you do memorable? If you manufacture a product, for instance, what memory-making value do you create? If it’s a service, what do you do to make customers feel that they are the center of your universe? Negative experiences detract from the delight factor. In other words, getting out of your own way is key. To think about it from a personal point-of-view, imagine it’s a couple’s anniversary. One person forgets. The other person plans a surprise night out that becomes a memorable experience, thus explicitly boosting the relationship.
- Do you create products or services that help people create memory-making experiences? Yes, Pokemon Go counts. People are inclined to capture and share such experiences thus augmenting your brand-building efforts with their unique emotional experiences.
- Do you have a business that merges people and their interests? Fostering social expansion can lead to life-changing connections and memories.
- If you’re in the B2B space, what is it that you do to help your clients foster positive emotional connections with their end customers?
- If you are a non-profit or social entrepreneurship, what sorts of life-changing impact do you create? How do you tell the stories of that impact?
- What steps do you take to anticipate latent needs, and how quick are you to adapt to such needs? Being proactive and knowing your customers better than they know themselves are great ways to keep them anticipating what delight you will provide them with next.
- If we are designed to crave the unexpected, how do your customer journeys reflect unanticipated touchpoints? We design them, based on customer data, but with a sensitivity to trends and channels that allow customers to seek out social support and real-life experiences.
The experiences we remember are defined by change. Our stories are made up of experiences that are new, novel and those that have greater significance. We actually don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. — Daniel Kahneman
In short, the most important experiences are the ones we remember most clearly, and that has a lot to do with the emotions attached to it. Positive memories drive future behavior. What is important to understand is that mundane experiences don’t stick in our memories, extraordinary ones do. So what do you do to surprise and delight?
