How far are you willing to go to satisfy your customers?
In Mindvalley, we take customer satisfaction seriously. We don’t want to just satisfy them with our products, we want to delight them with our service. We want them to keep coming back for more.
I recently went to a much talked about restaurant in Singapore called Aston’s Grill. It’s a western style budget food shop with a queue line that you’d expect from an Apple’s iPhone launch.
It took me about an hour to squeeze in and I didn’t give up because I wanted to understand why people are raving so much about this place. Sure the atmosphere was nice, but the food must be phenomenal. I finally dug in my generous portion of steak and it was everything I expected. It was good and tender and savory.
But what’s curious about this place is the amount of side dish in every table. It seems like no one had just ordered one kind of side dish. There were potato chips, French fries, and baked potatoes as if people were afraid to run out.
People are raving about the side dishes – enough to a point that someone had 15 side dishes to go with a chicken chop. It was all because of special ingredient on the side dishes: Paprika Salt.
What Aston’s Grill did to succeed was fairly simple.
First, serve a savory and generous portion of western food. That is their main product. It should be good. It should be satisfying. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart.
Second, serve the food in a laid-back place and fill it with waiters who will be happy to serve your food. That was their delivery and packaging method. Their food might’ve been great, but if the place was a health-hazard, the whole thing will still fall apart.
Third, take a seemingly insignificant thing, and add a dash of effort to it. The side dishes were, in literal terms, on the sidelines. Some restaurants will even give you cut vegetables as side dish – minimal effort for something that is not really on the center stage. But, this dash of effort shows how much attention Aston’s Grill pays to details in order to go above and beyond what is expected of them. The entire experience is elevated and tied together because everything is perfect. This little detail was not taken for granted. I call this, the Paprika Effect.
The main problem is that it takes a bit of effort and a considerable amount of time to add customer delight to your main product items “your big offerings, which are your main course. But, when it come to the small things, the smaller battles, the “low-hanging fruit” as it were, if you tweak the little things first, you will create a domino effect so that by the time you reach the “main course”, you already have a line of fanatical customers.
In the same manner, in the US, everyone goes to Gordon Biersch because of the ‘Gordon Biersch Garlic Fries’. It’s a very similar concept, but it’s funnier because Gordon Biersch is a microbrewery and people go there because of what they’ve done with their fries!
Let’s put it this way. When people go to a grill house, they expect good steak and decent side dishes, simply because they’re mostly paying for good steak. They get satisfied, but they don’t get delighted. Just adding paprika to the chips turns customers into fanatics who want to come back, and knock at your door again.
Joe Girard, the world’s #1 retail person, said something very simple: his strategy was to send out postcards that said, “I like you”. For example, every now and again you could send your customers a postcard that says “I like you”, and with it comes with a small extra bonus. It can something as simple as an audio, but is has to be totally unexpected. I emphasize on “customers” because we know that if you start by giving things free, people don’t normally value it at all.
You can start immediately after they buy – you can turn people into fans right from the beginning and get rid of all the doubts they may have had. It also gets them to consume more of your products, and that in turn makes it more likely that they’ll come back to buy more. When you add that element of customer delight, your business even has the potential to go viral, a formula that Centerpointe has used quite successfully.
You can do it, too. First, you need to create and put in place a proper customer relations system. For example, make sure you have a separate buyers list. Once you have the basics in place, you can start figuring out how to add paprika because if you don’t have proper customer relationships or a proper back end, doing this might not be as effective.
Then, you can think about the various components of your customer relationship. Where can you add paprika? Think about a small thing that other people ignore that you can make great. What tweaks can you make? Instead of a .pdf file, can you send a video file instead? When you do those little things, you create something for your customers to form a long queue about.
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