The payoff of making delight intentional: First ever rigorous study

Room 1 | 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm | Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Delighting customers is a goal of many companies but few make significant investments because finance is skeptical. Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC) has executed the first-ever rigorous study of the loyalty, margin and word of mouth impacts of 14 specific delight actions across more than a dozen industries including financial services, CPG, health care, travel, internet/communications and automotive. Surprisingly, actions such as cross-selling and educating on possible problems the customer will encounter (transparency) were powerful delight actions.

CCMC surveyed 2,512 affluent consumers on their delight experiences and compared the impacts of delight to leaving customers just completely satisfied. In many cases, delighted customers indicated they would pay much more for the product, allowing companies to increase margins. Further, many of the delight actions were low effort/investment, such as showing enthusiasm or cross-selling. This report also presents a proof of concept conducted by the sponsor, VIPDesk and BeautyCounter.com which conducted a controlled pilot test with 2,500 delight contacts and 2,500 control contacts which were then surveyed. A 4% lift in top box satisfaction was achieved with 90% confidence. We also highlight the challenges of measuring delight and the impact on loyalty, margins and word of mouth impact.

Key takeaways:

1. Delight can be a major differentiator and market research should invest in measurement of delight and its market impact implications. Attendees will leave with a blueprint for identifying delighters and a plan for demonstrating their impact via a low cost/effort proof of concept.
2. Counterintuitive actions (like talking about possible problems) can build trust and create delight as opposed to turning off customers. This data can be used to convince marketing and product management to set proper customer expectations and invest in customer onboarding education.
3. MR should take the lead in advocating for experimentation and measurement of delight in both consumer and B2B environments.

Consumers Presentation by Supplier Research Report