As part of today’s online Engage eSummit, Gary Tucker, SVP and General Manager of JD Power and Associates, talked about the importance of delighing your customers in the current economic environment, as well as the resulting increases in financial performance for companies that come with improving their customer satisfaction.

Tucker recommended five steps that organizations can use to pursue customer delight, including: 

1. Focus – Who owns the customer experience? Is everyone traveling down the same road? The companies that really stand out have a very clear understanding of who in their organization owns the customer experience. The companies that perform best have engrained that sense of ownership in everyone across the organization.

2. Quantify – What is most important to your customers? (It varies by company and brand). Companies often spend a lot of money in areas that don’t pay back. What are the drivers of customer satisfaction in your industry? Look at it through the lense of the people, presentation, price, product quality, and the process that a customer goes through. Each one of those five Ps represents an area of opportunity for your company to improve. Know what your drivers are so that you can focus your improvement on things that are going to have the most value to your customers–and the greatest payback for your company. 

3. Prioritize actions based on benchmarks – Who/what are my target customers comparing me to? Why are they defecting? Why are they shopping for an alternative solution? Knowing this information will help you understand and forecast your customers’ expectations and needs.

4. Define the business case upfront – What’s it worth to me in lower defection rates? Lower costs? Increased share? $$$$? Connect customer satisfaction activity with the same discipline and scrutiny is critical to getting the equation right.

5. Monitor and make course corrections – Getting good at delighting your customers is not an event. You’ve got to have a continuous customer feedback loop. Make sure that customers are feeling the changes that you’re making. If not, make course corrections. 

As Tucker pointed out, satisfaction is the path, but not the destination. The destination through an excellent customer experience is commitment–that part of a customer’s behavior that creates power for a brand. The primary input to commitment is the experience that customers have.

Kevin Mellander, Director of Customer Care, Allegiance