One of the more well-known customer service goals is delighting your customers, a self-explanatory outcome for sure, but exactly how do you go about achieving this goal?  More specifically, how do you get your customer-facing employees to delight your customers?

Customer delight is created first by how we listen and then respond to the customer, not just how we respond to them.  If you’re my customer, my ability to delight you depends on whether I first determine what it’s going to take to delight you and then on how well I cater to your needs.

In order to feel delighted, customers need to have more than just their practical problem or issue resolved.  All customers with a service-related problem or issue also have an emotional need tied to their particular practical need.  Sometimes the emotional need is readily apparent, but more often than not, the emotional need does not reveal itself – it needs to be uncovered.  Identifying, addressing and satisfying the customer’s emotional need is the key to unlocking customer delight and customer loyalty.

Of course, your employees must have the proper technical and functional skills to effectively address, work through and solve customer complaints, problems and issues.  But that, by itself, is merely a baseline customer expectation, sufficient perhaps to produce a satisfied customer, but rarely enough to delight the customer.

The best way to discover the customer’s emotional need is to engage the customer with questions tailored to his specific practical problem or situation.

As your employees become increasingly proficient and efficient at asking the right questions and identifying and addressing your customers’ emotional needs during their customer interactions, they will become more successful at creating delighted customers on a consistent basis.

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