Delighting Your Customers

Someone sent me this wonderful short video (under a minute) of Will Guidara telling the story of how Chewy, the online pet retailer, delights its customers when their pet passes away. I highly recommend watching as it might change the way you think about your customer’s experience with your product.

Back when I worked with Zocdoc, the online medical appointment scheduling service, once in a while, a patient would book an appointment, and the doctor wouldn’t have their schedule updated, and they’d have to cancel the appointment, resulting in a negative customer experience and the potential loss of that patient as a customer. Whenever this happened, our customer service team would immediately reach out to the patient, apologize, offer the opportunity to reschedule, and give them a free Amazon gift card. This took a very negative experience and turned it into a positive one, and in many cases, actually resulted in increased patient engagement and satisfaction.

I think every company should force this kind of delight somewhere into their customer journey. The critics will tell you these things don’t scale. And in a way, they don’t. But that’s sort of the point. That kind of magic and customer delight doesn’t need to scale because these are the things that lift you above the crowd, make you remarkable, and create an outsized return. These things take a little courage to implement, but they’re the kind of thing that customers and employees talk about and never forget.

I haven’t worked at Zocdoc in more than a decade, and here I am, talking about it today.