Should You Surprise and Delight Your Customer? Shep Hyken Says No. Here’s Why…

When talking about customer experience, every business owner has probably heard the phrase “surprise and delight your customer”. While this might seem like common sense at first, what if we told you that customers don’t always want to be surprised? In this segment, we talk to Shep Hyken, customer experience expert and New York Times Best-Selling author of “The Amazement Revolution”. Shep discussed the surprise and delight concept in more detail and provided us with some expert insight.

At first glance, surprising and delighting every single one of your customers seems like a no brainer. However, according to Shep, this very often isn’t the case. The fundamental core of executing an exceptional customer experience strategy is to provide your customers with a consistent above average experience. Mistakes will inevitably happen, but the ways in which your business handles customer complaints speaks volumes about your company as a whole.

It might seem like the easy solution to a customer complaint is to award the customer with a comped purchase, or discount off their next order. However, this is only a temporary band-aid. Clients are less inclined to return and use that discount because they will be expecting similar sub-par service. Shep says your focus as a business owner should be on the delight have of the surprise and delight mantra. To make a poor customer experience right, and continue to improve, he recommends the following:

1. Acknowledge
2. Apologize
3. Fix it
4. Owning up
5. Act with urgency

To find out more about Shep’s customer experience expertise, be sure to watch our entire interview above, and check out his past interviews on ASBN.

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