In this article, we looked at the importance of surprising customers and how it can be good or bad for your business.
Most people love to be surprised (in a good way). It makes their life experiences more exciting and memorable.
Therefore, as a service provider, we can offer extra exciting options (based on the timescale offered in our service) to prospects that will make them surprised and more excited about their business’ future.
The point is that surprising your customers is an optional choice. It is nice to do, but your core responsibilities at the minimum level should be to avoid “Gold-Plating” (Gold-Plating is the act of giving the customer more than what they originally asked for) and to focus on providing services that will solve your customers’ problem or enable them to pursue a new opportunity.
Let’s look at the “extra exciting options” again. These options can happen in two ways:
1) The first one is the time that you take to listen to your customers, understand their requirements and expectations and during the time that you work with them, you make a decision to surprise them by doing something especially for them. This is a good method that most businesses will provide free of charge, or with an attractive discount, and there are various reasons for it.
– They want to show appreciation to their customers who will then refer others to them, or their customers will use their services for an extended period.
– Their customers will help them to improve their services through the feedback they provide.
– They want to build deeper relationships and rapport with their customers.
Remember that in this way, what you want to do is to surprise your customers. It is important you know the reason for doing this and more importantly, you should try to offer or do valuable things for them whenever possible. The key here is that your customers should see, feel and understand the value of the things that you offer or do for them.
2) The second way is if someone wants to obtain your service for someone else or a group of people. In this way, you should plan how you can make people surprised by using your service. People may want to surprise others for different reasons. For example, reserving a restaurant to celebrate a birthday or anniversary, visiting a special place, attending a special event, etc. In such cases, they will contact you and ask for help.
In this second way, you should pay attention to 3 things:
– You must understand your customers’ requirements and expectations. You should properly and clearly identify what is needed, so you can gather the right information about the people who want to use your service and provide a surprise.
– You must do your best to create a great experience for your customers. This is so important, as you should create the best experience for all your customers. However, if you need to provide a surprise for an individual or a group of people, then you should take it more seriously. If you cannot do something or you are not sure how to do it, do not overpromise.
Before we talk about the third way, let me share a story about one of my experiences here.
I remember the time that I wanted to give my family a surprise for their birthdays by going on a horse riding trip. The lady on the phone did not ask anything about whether there was a special reason for this booking!
So I let her know why this booking was so important to me. It was only then that she let me know they have a special package for celebrating birthdays and she explained the package. It looked perfect to me, so I ordered it. But when we went there, they provided none of the services that the lady had stated was in the package. The outing was a great disappointment and we decided to never ever recommend their services to others who wanted to experience horse riding.
– You must stick to the defined plan and be punctual in delivering it. You cannot imagine how many stores and businesses that I have heard about or personally experienced, where they offered extra options for their services and then failed to deliver as promised. I talked with them by phone and even in some cases, I went to their places to work on the plan, but when they executed it, they did not follow the plan or they executed it with a low-quality outcome.
To resolve the above problems, as part of my work with my service-based business clients, I help them to ensure that they have the right things that will make people surprised AND that they are capable of delivering them.
If you can pay attention to the issues discussed above and address them in the right way in your business, then it will pay off very well. In other words, you will have satisfied customers who love to do more business with you and/or are more than happy to refer you to others. You can also charge premium prices for your extra exciting options!
