Customer support that (actually) delights

In a world where customer support is increasingly the difference between buy or no buy, stay or no stay, just about everyone loves to market themselves as ‘customer centric/driven/motivated/leading/delightors/dinosaurs/satisfyers/ninjas/hillbillies’.

A phrase I regularly hear is ‘we love to delight the customer’. But what does that mean? From a corporate point of view, it’s usually sales based – ‘we love to delight the customer’ = ‘we make people happy enough that they keep buying from us’. This counteracts the selfless act of delighting another human being – or, to remove the buzzword – unselfishly making another human happy for the sake of happiness.

With everyone apparently looking to ‘delight’ the customer, the companies that really mean it with true intentions still stand out from the pack. Amazon, Apple, and John Lewis (UK) are all examples of companies famed and loved for their customer service, a by product of which is customers come back again and again, or in the SaaS world… keep on subscribing.

I had a great experience that made me happy today. I wanted to share it quickly, because credit where it’s due and all that.

Having signed up for Drift a few days ago, I’ve received a series of automated emails from their team, usually signed off with something like “One favor before I go: reply to this email and let me know why you signed up?” A cool human touch and admirable.

To my surprise though, they actually follow through with the promise. I replied to another of their team to test it out and had a great conversation off the back of it. This morning when I got another email from the team, the signoff said this…

“I also love it when people respond directly to me. This is usually what I do when I get a response…

…so don’t hesitate to reply to this email to let me know what you’re thinking.”

Well. How could I resist?

My reply was simply: “I feel like I need an actual video of you dancing at your desk now I’ve replied.”

A couple of hours passed and I forgot about it. Then, a message from Matt at Drift popped into my mailbox.

Attached was this little nugget of delight.

It made me happy – and I showed my colleagues who laughed too. For a moment – we were delighted and reminded of how software and the internet can do great things like making people the other side of the world dance at their desks and facilitate human interactions never possible before.

We’re going to use Drift – not just because the software lets us do things to connect us to our customers like we haven’t before, but because their team do silly dances and care about people, or in the words of Matt… “Or…really, if it makes people laugh or smile…that’s the true goal here.”

David Cancel, CEO of Drift will be speaking at Business of Software Conference USA 2016 about he built his team around his customers. It’s a happy coincidence that I experienced this first hand, but I know I’ll be listening intently come the conference.