Happy Sunday, friends đ
This past week, I spent a ton of time speaking with candidates for our Support Specialist role at Ness. A significant portion of each conversation was dedicated to our approach to customer support. We use terms like delight, consumer-obsessed, and customer-first in the job description, and I want to translate exactly what that means to candidates.
Then mid-week, I stumbled across a Twitter thread all about axing the term âdelightâ in customer support. Below is an attempt to explain both sides and arrive at why I feel like delight still has a place. Read it and let me know what you think.
Hope you have a great week ahead!
Jeremey
Thanks for being a part of this newsletter. Every Sunday evening, I send a note about solving problems and wowing customers. Please say hi (reply here or at jeremeylduvall@gmail.com). Iâd love to hear from you.
Should we really keep using the term "delight" in customer support?
This week, I came across a Twitter discussion about the term âdelightâ in Customer Support.
The word has had a precipitous rise and (depending on who you talk to) fall within the industry.
After Tony Sheh published Delivering Happiness, many companies decided they were going to be amazing at customer support - this was now their âcore competencyâ. Hitting SLAs and maintaining a high CSAT became wrapped up in terms like surprise, wow, and delight. This was further reinforced by companies like Ritz-Carlton making headlines for how they treated a little boyâs left-behind stuff animal.
Then, Matthew Dixon published The Effortless Experience, and many minds in the industry started to shift the other direction. Surprise and delight werenât the goal; instead, the ideal destination was a âlow effort experience,â one marked by comprehensive self-service channels and next issue avoidance. The holy grail wasnât press headlines or a 100% CSAT score; those were indirect forecasts of brand loyalty at best. The goal was to reduce effort required by the customer to resolve an issue - make it simple and easy.
At this very moment, I have a Support Specialist role posted at Ness that uses the term âdelightâ purposefully (please apply!). I want to reiterate the case for where âdelightâ falls short and why I believe it still has a place in the industry.
Where âdelightâ falls short
Before jumping in to why I feel delight shouldnât be totally cast aside, letâs summarize some of the reasons why it has fallen out of favor.
It doesnât tell your team what to do.
Letâs say youâre writing a guide for new agents joining your team. Your goal is to impart the critical 100-200 words theyâll keep top of mind when working with customers.
Now, imagine that most of that guide reads like this:
Remember, delight is our number one objective. We want customers telling their friends and family about our brand so go knock their socks off in the queue. Put a smile on their faces. Make your interaction memorable!
Sure, maybe that could work, but it doesnât tell them:
How to prioritize one ticket over another
When to make exceptions for customers
What features to prioritize in the next release
Whether they should optimize for fast response times or first contact resolutions (or some mixture)
âGo delight our customers!â might make a good motivational topic, but you have to translate that to tangible actions for your team.
Itâs lagging (at best).
Related to the tangible aspect, delight often manifests in things like CSAT, NPS, repeat buyers, decreased churn, and (in rare instances) tweets/posts/PR stories. These are all great indicators that your strategy is working, but theyâre all lagging indicators (if they show up at all).
Weâre looking for leading actions and indicators - âpredictors of delightâ that we can implement, evaluate, and tweak.
If the goal of our customer support organization is to delight our customers, itâs really difficult to understand how weâre doing day after day or even week after week. Instead, if we further define delight by specific actions (% of replies within X hours or % of contacts resolved on first contact, for example), we can better evaluate our progress over a day/week/month.
Lagging indicators create a slow learning cadence, which is not what weâre looking for.
It often bumps against the three pâs.
That is people, profits, and processes - three categories that determine what your organization can or canât do.
Letâs say youâre part of an organization:
With a profit model based upon razor-thin margins.
With a performance evaluation process specifically focused on an agentâs volume, average handle time, and âefficiencyâ (e.g. how much of their working time they spend talking to customers)
And agents (people) that receive bonuses based on taking the most calls over a given month.
Together, these three pâs incline the organization towards a specific model of customer support. Itâs difficult (read: not impossible) to flip the script towards a delight-centered approach focused on high quality interactions and creating raving fans.
Takeaway: For âdelightâ to work, it has to be aligned with the business at all levels. People are highly adaptable, but profit models and processes are harder to flip upside down.
Itâs not really what customers want.
If you were to ask me what I want when I contact customer support, Iâd probably say, âMy issue resolved.â I would not say, âAn over-the-top experience that Iâll relay to friends and family for weeks.â Yet, putting the emphasis on overdelivering during each interaction emphasizes the latter even when most customers just want the former.
Why delight still has a place in support
Thatâs 500 words on why I feel delighting customers is often a great intent but ultimately misguided objective. So, why did I include it specifically in our job description?
Primarily because itâs a helpful signal externally and a guidepost internally.
Externally, itâs a signal to candidates that theyâre integral to our success as a company. Weâre committed to giving them the tools, resources, and time necessary to build relationships and deliver for our customers. Their work will matter to the bottom line of the business. In many companies, customer support is strictly a cost center; this is one tiny way to signal weâre viewing it differently.
Internally, itâs a philosophical reminder that weâve chosen to invest heavily in customer support. âDelight customersâ connotes something entirely different than âsatisfyâ or âappeaseâ.
More concretely, itâs a reminder that we should put the customer first when building our internal processes and choosing what to measure. Initiatives within support should ultimately be evaluated based on the customer outcomes they achieve.
Wrapping This All Up
Ultimately, I donât think the term is the problem here. Call it delight or surprise or wow - this piece matters less. The key is to not stop there. These terms have to be lived out across your business including how you hire, incentivize, and evaluate team members, what you measure, and what goals you set for your organization.
Whatâd I miss? Iâd love to get your thoughts.