My granddaughters are in the annual early October throes of deciding on a costume for this coming Halloween. It is a chance for imagination and competition! Wonder Woman and Mal from Descendants, even Jasmine from Aladdin, are getting extra nods. It all made me think about what costume I would don. Here is a peephole into my admittedly sinister mind.
Your doorbell rings early evening on October 31st . . . and impatiently rings and rings and rings. At your front door is a young child dressed in a man’s business suit and holding an open cloth moneybag filled with one-dollar bills. You quickly realize this must be an enterprising trick-or-treater who ditched the idea of candy for the folding kind of treat. You smile and oblige the child with a dollar.
“Who are you?” you ask, wanting to understand the child’s unorthodox costume. “I am a customer! And if your jack-o-lanterns are not bigger and your decorations a lot shinier next year, I am going to tell all my friends to egg your house!’ You suddenly get the real meaning of “trick.” It is a metaphor with a point.
Customers today can be scary. Armed with the muscular wide reach of social media, they can use a negative tweet, scathing review, or a snarky YouTube video to “egg” your business. With expectations constantly rising, if you do not perpetually spruce up your “decorations” and the size of your “jack-o-lanterns,” you are asking for a commercial whoopin’.
The scary side is not that the customers at the front door of your enterprise just want new offerings, better quality stuff, or even lower prices—they want a shiny experience. Good service is only the ticket to maintenance and retention, not to customer advocacy and bottom line growth. And the scariest part is the new standard for that shiny experience.
Consider this: almost 100 million people watched Maroon 5 sing “Harder to Breathe” during the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show in Atlanta. Over 150 million people have been awed by a Cirque Du Soleil performance. These are the customers at your front door. And they look at the uniqueness and splendor of your experience decoration through those same Super Bowl/Cirque eyes.
What can you do to bring a bit of whimsy, Cracker Jack surprise, or kaleidoscope color to your customers’ experiences? Your customers are judging you, not by the fashion you meet their needs, but by the way you make them feel. A strong emotional connection is now a requirement, not an extra. Make your customers grin, swoon, or giggle and they will come back to your front door again with more loyal intentions.