Earlier today I was on a call with the customer support about home delivery for products that I bought in store.

The call itself lasted for around two minutes but the wait time was more than 15 minutes.

This got me thinking about the brand and how much attention they pay to customer support. I reckon not much beyond engaging a call center and sharing a standard procedure for operating.

The brand can reduce wait time by paying for more seats in the call center. I am sure there will be additional costs but it will be offset by customer retention. This is super important because, in the case of FMCG, price and convenience are two of the most important factors behind a buying decision.

Convenience is the reason why packaged food and large format stores became popular in the first place. These days customers expect a large selection of products and good in-store experience so there are fewer opportunities for brands to create customer delight. 

That is why brands need to be attentive and should seek out opportunities for creating a delightful experience for customers. Picking a customer’s call on the first ring is such an opportunity. Only a few brands do it so it is a novelty for most customers and can create delight. 

Setting expectations by sharing an expected time of delivery or maximum time of delivery and then delivering an hour before that time, can also create delight. Next frontier in this can be voice recognition and pulling recent purchases based on this before the customer brings up a grievance.

Customer delight is an important layer of a buyer’s experience and is worth pursuing. It can be a differentiator that can increase customer longevity not only for B2C but also for B2B. 

So a question worth asking yourself is: “How can I create customer delight?”