Tag: delight

The Garlic Mashed Potatoes

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

For a period of about five years, whenever we’d go out to a restaurant either my wife or I would order the dish with the garlic mashed potatoes. They were so yummy and creamy and decadent, with heaps more butter and garlic than we’d ever dare cook in at home. It pretty much didn’t matter what the main dish was.

Once garlic mashed potatoes began appearing on every menu, the allure went away. But the power of the surprise, the power of the side dish, hasn’t. As in, I just ate a take-out bowl of lentil chili, and at the bottom of the bag I discovered a completely unexpected corn muffin, which was really good. Not great enough, on its own, to make me go back next week nor (better still) so good that it’s really worth talking about, but still pretty darn good and worth remembering.

The thing about the garlic mashed potatoes or the corn bread is that they allow you, for once, to define the terms of the game. You rarely get to set expectations  – expectations mostly arrive in force when your customers show up – meaning you’re usually running as fast as you can to meet/not meet:surpass those expectations.  But with a side dish, with an unexpected surprise, you have the luxury of competing in a category that your customer didn’t even expect. It’s like applying for a job that hasn’t been posted yet: yes, you still have to be amazing, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to blow people away when they’re not busy systematically comparing you to the other 500 people whose names came in over the transom.

The garlic mashed potatoes is the best handwritten note your customer got all week (they haven’t received any), the phone call when everyone is busy filling their inbox. It’s showing up in person when everyone else is calling; giving a presentation with no slides when everyone who came before you bored them with a thousand bullet points; doing something wildly generous when you really, truly, have nothing to gain. It’s not being different for difference’s sake – garlic mashed potatoes are still dinner, after all – it’s doing something fabulous and unexpected that’s relevant to the core story you’re telling them.

Go ahead, why don’t you whip up a hot, piping batch of garlic mashed potatoes?

When it works

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The line at my local Chipotle looks like this each and every day at lunchtime, with 20+ people on line and more streaming through the door.  And each time I’m there, I’m in and out in 7 minutes or less.

chipotle

Conversely, there’s a lovely little bakery across the street from my office called Amy’s Bread. Most everything there is delicious (though wildly expensive), and I’d be there once a week if it weren’t for the fact that if Amy’s has anything more than four customers working their way through the line at the same time, their system grinds to a halt and it can take 10 minutes to get a salad and a piece of bread (let alone a hot pannini – 15 minutes or more!).

What’s going on here?  The fact is, it’s easy for us to spend our time time and energy focused on what went wrong: the customer that got away, the sale that didn’t close, the photo that we sent that didn’t pop as much as it should have, the pitch meeting that got off track and ended before it really started. What about the value we can create by making sure that everything goes just right when things go exactly the way they’re supposed to go?

What do we do when we come across a funder (customer) for whom our story completely aligns with their worldview, someone who jumps in quickly with both feet ready to help in a real way? Do we go above and beyond to make her experience more extraordinary, more remarkable, and more worth talking about than her wildest expectations?  Or, right after “closing the sale,” do we run around after the next potential customer or, worse, are we too busy breaking a sweat doing backflips for our loudest, most disgruntled customer – never mind that they might be the wrong customer for us – that we don’t pay enough attention to anybody else?

Step 1 is figuring out who, exactly, we are trying to serve, what their worldview is, the emotional change we expect to happen when they come in contact with our story, and what action we would like them to take when we’ve succeeded in making that change.

*phew* we say. Success. We did ALL of those hard things.

Yes, it’s success, and it’s just the start. The most important, value-added part we can do is to make sure that our perfect customer is beyond delighted after they become our customer.

Chipotle knows exactly what to do when 10 hungry people walk through the door on the hunt for a hot, fresh burrito.

Are you also ready to delight your best customers when they say “YES, I’m buying what you’re selling”?

The Chana and the Dal

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Occasionally I pick up a little Indian food in Grand Central Station on the way home from work.  These are always semi-rushed encounters of picking two veg entrees as part of a platter over rice (mysteriously, with a bit of iceberg lettuce on the side) crammed into a plastic takeout container.

Chana MasalaThe last time I was there I ordered Chana Masala (chickpeas in a tomato sauce) and Dal (yellow lentils).  As the owner was packing up my order at the register, he asked what had happened with my Dal.  While I had a nice portion of Chana, the Dal was a watery, soupy thing with barely a spoonful of lentils.  The owner gave my plate back to the server, haranguing him to give me a decent serving of Dal.  The guy gave me a bit more, still mostly too-thin broth, and it took one more exchange between the server and the owner before a decent pile of lentils ended up on my plate.

What the owner knows, but the server forgets, is where the transaction starts and ends.  To the server, I’m just another guy placing an order, one in a long line of people he’ll serve in a day.  The transaction starts when I make my order, and it ends when I shift down the line to pay.

What the owner realizes is that the transaction starts way before a customer arrive, beginning at the moment when she decides to pick this place out of the 50-odd places where she could grab a bite in Grand Central.  In this transaction, he’s up against the Shake Shack and Two Boots Pizza and Magnolia Bakery.  He’s also up against Golden Krust (Jamaican patties, right by the train track), Zaro’s Bakery, Chirping Chicken (best roast chicken in NY), and about 30 other places.

Winning the battle against all of that noise is really hard.  Which means that the moment the customer shows up is the big win.  The hard work has been done and now we have a one-to-one interaction where the only choice we have is to delight that customer – in this case with an extra five cents worth of Dal.

How often is our customer standing right there, smile on her face and money in her hand, saying “delight me”….and we miss?

We miss because we forget that whenever we have the choice between shouting louder to get more people to stop and delighting the people who are standing there in front of us, we must choose, every time, to delight.

Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition

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I hadn’t seen this video until now.  It’s a 2006 spoof/thought experiment about what would happen if Microsoft designed the 2005 iPhone packaging (Step 1: rename it to “Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition (with Subscription).  The final reveal comes at 2:30 in the video, but it’s the build that really packs a punch.

We hear all the time that we can’t delight anyone if our products are created by a committee.  Indeed, we nod knowingly at how everyone else falls into that trap.

But do we have one person whose sole job is to cut away absolutely everything (everything!) that’s unnecessary to achieving the vision, to delighting the customer?

N.B. there are two non-negotiable prerequisites in the prior sentence:

  1. Knowing who the customer is
  2. Having a vision of what you want her experience to be

Of course in the long term you don’t need just one virtuoso or visionary, but you do need a first time when you put out a product that makes a lot of important people within (or outside) your organization upset, because you’ll have put something out into the world that isn’t for everyone.

(And yes, sometimes we – you, me – end up being the committee.  Oops.)

Microsoft iPod Package

Simple, direct, actionable

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

You can choose to do one of two things:

  1. Try to convince new people that they want to help you.
  2. Give people who are already convinced they want to help you a useful job to do.

The first one feels a lot more like productive work, because you’re churning away and shouting from the rooftops.

The second one will likely have more impact in the long run.

You can deliver magic

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Think about the difference between “good enough” and “magical.”

It was the difference, five years ago, between the iPod and the Microsoft Zune (or, for now at least, the iPad and everything).

It’s the difference between a Tiffany’s ring in its eggshell-blue box, and the identical ring you can get 10 blocks away in New York City’s diamond district for half the price.

It’s Zappos giving you free, next-day shipping the first time you order.

Or, back in the day, when your FedEx arrived the next morning, every time, no matter what.

“Magical” isn’t a little better than “good enough”, magical crushes the competition.

Of course, making the entire Apple experience magical is a big deal: they need to deliver, to everyone, the whole package: hardware, software, design, the Apple store, Mac Geniuses, Steve Job keynotes, even those snappy new cases on the iPad 2.

The good news is, you probably don’t need to do a fraction of this to deliver magic.  If you’re not Apple, I’m guessing that most of your success depends on a handful of customers (less than 20, I’m guessing…and even if it doesn’t just depend on such a small number, you can start small).  Curiously, delivering a magical experience to 20 people isn’t actually that hard.  Yes, you have to amaze, surprise, care for, and delight these folks, but there are only 20 of them, and I’m sure if you decide to do this you can do it right away – much more quickly and easily than you expected.

What would it take, really, to deliver magic to just the tippity-top of your top customers?  (not much).

So what’s stopping you?

Out (f-cking) care the competition

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I just learned last week about Gary Vaynerchuk from Seth Godin’s Domino Project (great post, Ishita), another great example of someone who pokes the box (you mean you haven’t read Poke the Box yet?  What are you waiting for?  It’s a top 100 book on Amazon, for goodness sake, and it will help you see that you don’t need to wait for anyone’s permission.    OK fine, I’ll write a review soon).

Then just yesterday a colleague told me that Gary’s talk at last weeks’ SXSW-Interactive was one of the top three at the whole darn conference.  Besides the entertainment value of Gary’s, uh, colorful vocabulary, (2 minutes and 4 seconds without dropping the “f-bomb”) Gary’s main message was that companies are going to win and lose based on who can “out care” their customers.

Speaking of caring (and not caring), the other night I was at Magnolia Bakery, which helped start the NY cupcake craze and which shamelessly charges nearly $3 for an (admittedly delicious) cupcake.   But service is slow.  The store is set up Disney-land style (pick your cupcakes here, walk down the long counter for the chance to buy more stuff, pay at the register at the end) which might work when there’s a throng of customers but makes no sense when you’d rather just drop six bucks in a jar and walk away with two cupcakes.

I was running late for a show, so I noticed when it took me (and the other six other customers in the store) nearly 10 minutes to buy cupcakes (two cupcakes per couple, so really three customers).  Bad enough, but much worse because there were 8 Magnolia employees chatting, working, and doing everything but notice that their empty shop had a logjam.  I even asked one of them if I could just pay and go, and she said she wasn’t assigned to the register.

“Too cool for school” might be an OK customer service approach when your shop is flooded with tourists looking for a “real NY experience,” but for the rest of us chickens it’s time to think seriously about out-caring the competition.  If you don’t believe me, read the blow-by-blow Zappos story in Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, and remind yourself again and again: this is a billion dollar company with rabid fans who buy SHOES ONLINE.

While last week’s post about new humanism generated a lot of interest, some comments said that David Brooks’ arguments are old hat.  The ideas may not be new, but they’re certainly not mainstream (in business, in economics, in how we teach our kids), and I think it’s high time that changes.  It’s much more than a tweak to the old models….if you really take it seriously you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start afresh.

For example, the old way of thinking about customer service says that customers want the best product for the best price, and oh, yes, they want to good customer service too (read: nice-to-have, sort of like “soft skills”…can you hear the derisive sneer?).  The Zappos way of thinking says that creating an off-the-charts customer experience is the ONLY thing that matters.  For Zappos, it’s the end-all be-all.

It may be that Magnolia Bakery can ignore out-caring the competition because they serve up enough sugary, buttery goodness to anesthetize their customers (or, more seriously, because waiting forever confirms the story of cupcakes you flew across the country to try), but for the rest of us, it’s time to start out-caring the competition.

That means real relationships, every time.  It means you actually care, you don’t just act like you care.  It means you put emotional effort into everything you do.  It’s not easy to copy, which is why if you do it with abandon, you win.

Optically delighted

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Former Acumen Fund Fellow Karthik Janakiraman shared these thoughts with me, and he was gracious enough to allow me to post his note in its entirety.  It’s a perfect follow-on to my Magic post about Zappos.

I read your blog and often have noticed that you talk about being “delighted”. I had an experience from a relatively obscure company and wanted to share it with you.

I had to purchase a few optical filters from a company called thorlabs.com and I decided to go with them because they were the cheapest.

I was on the website at 4.35ET and was desperate for these filters.  I had to get the order in by 5pm in order to make the overnight shipment cutoff. I did get the order in but was skeptical about having the filters ship out because I had a vision of some guy sitting in a warehouse, thinking about bailing for the day, who may or may not hustle to get my order in.

To my delight, at 5.01pm , I get an email with a FedEx tracking number on it.

The next day, I open up the box to see the filters and a bunch of snacks (trail mix, cereal bars and cookies) encased in a box called “Lab Food”.  I was absolutely delighted!

The net cost of the goodies was probably 4 or 5 bucks when the snacks are bought in bulk. I spent roughly 600 bucks, so for about 1% of sales this company has converted me into an evangelist and definitely a repeat customer. Great execution as well and I did not even have a human interaction.

Karthik’s story takes the idea in the Zappos post – that you can create magic anywhere – a step further.  To delight, you must surprise, which means you must surpass expectations.  You can do this in any customer interaction – it doesn’t matter if you’re selling shoes or optical filters or an idea.

Ideally, your create delight in a completely customized way.  But this isn’t always possible.  In which case you can, like Zappos (and, according to Karthik, like Thorlabs) build processes that are so above the bar that you can consistently delight nearly everyone.

Put another way, being exceptional and being systematic are in no way mutually exclusive.

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Things that work

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Here’s post #3 in a connected series of events.

First, I wrote a post about trust which, from what I saw and heard (traffic, comments, feedback) was well-received.  Then, connected to that post, I received a totally unexpected gift from a friend, which itself generated another post about delight, and I spent most of Friday on a real high thanks to this delightful gift and the real generosity it showed.

At the end of the day Friday, just as the skies opened up with yet another downpour, a little something brought me down a notch:  I discovered that I (boneheadedly) left my coat on the train that morning, and it was lost.

So here’s post #3 in the series, because I just got my coat back.

Yes, it’s true.  I was sure I had left my coat on the train on Friday morning, so I called up the MTA on Saturday to register the lost coat.  I figured it was long gone.  A medium black Banana Republic coat on the commuter train on a Friday morning…seemed like it would quickly find another home, and my faith in the MTA lost and found system wasn’t too great either.

Imagine my surprise when I got a phone call today from the MTA Lost and Found department.  “I believe we have your coat, sir.  We just need you to come in before 6pm to verify and pick it up.” Boy was I wrong about the MTA and their lost and found.

I rushed to Grand Central at the end of the day, and, lo and behold, Jason who mans the MTA lost and found went in the back and returned with my coat.   I filled out a short form, gave a copy of my driver’s license, and I was on my way.  I feel like I won the karmic lottery.

My only choice, then, is to put something positive back out into the world, but I need your help to create it: we need a blog or a community that holds up wonderful, daily, surprising, delightful, surprising examples of things that works.  We need more things that works and need to celebrate these small and big daily victories, and for Jason at the MTA Lost and Found Department, we need a space to celebrate the people on the front lines who create delightful customer experiences (but who, ironically, often find themselves buried somewhere deep in the org chart).  Unfortunately, the thingsthatwork URLs seem to be taken, but I’m sure there’s a blog waiting for someone to make this happen.  For example:

  • That cellphone rep who helped you sort out international calling plans.   Things that work.
  • Amazon giving a guarantee on price drops on items bought from their store, and getting $300 back a month after buying a TV.   Things that work.
  • The airline check-in agent who talked the gate agent into keeping the flight open for another 10 minutes so you wouldn’t miss a wedding abroad.  Things that work.

(oh, those are all real examples).

Please, start here in the comments section with your ideas.  But wouldn’t it be fun to create a crowdsourced conversation celebrating things that are so positive, unexpected, and important?  Go ahead, kick it off.

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Delight in the unexpected

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I just received a totally unexpected, perfect gift out of the blue from a friend for absolutely no reason.  It’s probably the most surprising gift I ever received.  It showed the person was paying attention and thinking of me; it was just what I wanted; and there was no good reason to give it to me, so the surprise factor was off the charts.

Lately my wife has been less and less interested in the big meal and big gift on the big day (anniversary, Valentine’s day, birthdays) in favor of the perfect meal at a surprising time on an otherwise inconsequential evening; the “I just saw this today and I thought you would love it” gift.

Delight is about the gap between what you expect and what you receive, so you have to pick the right thing at exactly the right moment — which is exactly when someone least expects it.

We all might want to rethink when is the right time to try to delight our customers, friends, loved ones.

Happy weekend.

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