Most people think that customer satisfaction and customer delight are the same thing, but they aren’t. Even through the definition of the adjectives, it’s easy to tell the difference. Being satisfied with something is clearly not the same thing as being delighted. Satisfaction means that your expectations have been met, whereas delight means that you are extremely happy and joyous, which is presumably because your expectations have been exceeded.

What Does Customer Delight Mean?

Customer delight is all about going above and beyond for your customers to give them as much value as possible. The advantage is that this value doesn’t stop with the customer. It goes around and comes back to your brand, gaining speed, momentum and size as it goes around.

Take the story of the Bungie Studios development team, the people behind the game Halo. A distraught father wrote them a letter, explaining his son couldn’t play the latest release of the game around the holidays because he was in hospital for liver transplant surgery. The team not only sent the boy a card signed by all of them with get well wishes, but they also built him a custom helmet that resembled that of the main character and brought him toys, custom art and shirts in person, when they visited the boy in hospital. The father posted pictures and told the entire story, which you can imagine had a significant impact on other customers and their emotional attachment to the brand.

The Bungie Studios team gesture might have been small from their point of view – after all, a few t-shirts, some custom art and a helmet didn’t cost the company much – but what they achieved was monumental because they made a little boy ecstatic and bought a ton of goodwill from other customers. Let’s not forget the word of mouth advertising they received from this story going viral and everyone discussing what a great company Bungie Studios must be if it employs such great people.

So, customer delight is all about making your customer feel special. It’s about listening to their concerns so you can take corrective measures before the issues become problems. It’s about creating a customer experience that makes them smile because they are so pleased.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Customer Delight

While stories like the Bungie Studios one are becoming more and more frequent as companies understand delighting their customers is essential to their future, it’s not something you can do with every customer

A customer satisfaction survey can be highly effective and can be used to constantly monitor how your customers feel about your brand and their interaction with it. Customer satisfaction survey questions need to take into account certain fundamental aspects, including the customer’s emotional connection to your brand, their loyalty, how happy they are with the various attributes of the product and/or service, and how likely they are to repurchase.

Luckily, there are many customer delight measurement tools available on the market that can make your life incredibly easy. Electronic surveys give you the ability to run such surveys on a regular basis, meaning that you can determine how effective your various strategies are.

These customer delight measurement software systems also make it easy for you to find out the motivation behind your customers’ answers. You can use them to find out why your customers are displeased with your brand and what you can do to improve. You can learn more about your customers wants and desires, which will make it much easier for you to take them from mere satisfaction to delight.

Customer satisfaction is all well and good. It’s something that should be at the core of every company’s mission. But if you really want your brand to thrive, then you need to aim for customer delight. You need to go the extra mile to make customers so happy to interact with your brand that they are constantly smiling. Not only will this delight the customer and turn them into a loyal customer, but word will spread and for every customer you go above and beyond for, you will gain many more advocates, such as with the Bungie Studios example.

After all, if you’ve never heard of Halo before, you probably want to know more about it now simply because of what they did for that little boy. They might have even gained a new customer in you. That is the power of truly delighting a customer.