One simple rule to exceed your customers’ expectations.

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

– Peter Drucker

One of my students asked me today if I think Neuromarketing is the future of marketing. “No”–I said –”the future of marketing is marketing”.

What did I mean? According to Kotler, marketing is “meeting needs profitably”. We want to make money helping a customer satisfy a need, solve a problem or make a desire come true. To do it, we can use a myriad of tools, like neuromarketing, channel design, pricing, branding, or digital marketing. It depends on the customers, their needs, and your decision to meet them.

When we talk about customer experience, the same rules apply. There’s not a specific digital, nor physical experience to worry about. There’s the whole experience, from when the customer wants something until he gets it, and it is defined by how you blueprint the experience, and exceed your customers’ expectations by design.

I had a conversation with a client last week. She asked about the specific moment when an employee decides to exceed her customer’s expectations. My answer was simple and bold: when she faces a customer, that employee already knows how far to go and exceed what her customer expects.

Think: if the purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer, like Drucker said, your job is to prepare your team to know what to do and how to go beyond those expectations. That, my friend, turns a regular customer into a loyal one, fitting Drucker’s phrase: the best way to retain your customers, is to make them loyal. A loyal customer stays willingly, and that is the foundation for a long and healthy relationship.

Try it. Design your customer experiences to always deliver more than what your customers expect. You won’t be disappointed, and they will be delighted.

One more thing. 

Imagineers are imagination engineers. Disney adopted the concept many years ago. My partners did too, and adopted the expression “we don’t want to do a job that isn’t first class”. Please, do the same. Commit to your customers. Don’t do anything that isn’t first class for them. Your revenues and your customers will thank you.

Before I forget.

Remember. To achieve this, you need employees who are both competent and empathetic. 49% and 51% of each, according to Danny Meyer. Try it. Your people will make the difference when you want to delight your customers.