Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to surprise and delight them.

Two great examples of this have stood out to me in the last week.

Amazon.com

I’m a shockingly frequent Amazon shopper. There are so many things that I used to go to the shopping centre for that I now order from the comfort of my couch. Normally the stuff I order turns up at my house without a hitch, but this week (admittedly for the first time ever), a package went missing.

It took me a while to find the right email address to write to, but I found a link under the support section for enquiries about missing deliveries. I wrote a careful email describing exactly what the problem was, and I took special care to explain that I had looked at the delivery tracker and the package was listed as “undeliverable”. After an instant auto-responder mail, two days later I got a canned response back that politely asked me to check the delivery tracker if I wanted to see the status of my delivery…

The point is, it was quite clear that the person dealing with my inquiry didn’t really take the time to read my email properly or understand my situation, or else they wouldn’t have asked me to check the delivery tracker again, when it was clear that I had already done so, and that was the reason I was contacting them in the first place.

WordPress.com

I had a bit of a silly blunder and purchased an upgrade from wordpress.com for the wrong blog. In wordpress you need to purchase upgrades for a particular blog you own, and somehow I bought it for the wrong one.

I emailed support and told them what happened, but I didn’t really expect much in the way of support. To my surprise, less than 30 minutes later I got a response from a real person, who told me he had simply switched the upgrade to the right blog, and that was that. Then he signed with his first name, which I thought was a nice, personal touch.

I was astounded, surprised – and absolutely delighted.

As a user, which of these two experiences am I likely to tell my friends about? Well, both of them actually…

Every interaction with a customer or user is an opportunity to delight them. You don’t get many opportunities… opportunities are difficult and expensive to get, and users are becoming increasingly more fickle and the number of other options is ever-increasing… so don’t you want to make the most of each and every opportunity you have?