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Home buyers expect ‘musts’ and express their desire for ‘wants,’ but it’s the strategically delivered ‘wows’ that lock in customer loyalty.
One of the best ways to solidify your relationship with customers is to “wow” them through a strategy of surprise and delight. This is not a new idea. Back in 1912, the makers of Cracker Jack enjoyed a dramatic increase in sales when they began to include a surprise toy in every package of the popcorn treat. Today’s consumers still have an insatiable desire for the unique and amazing, and home builders that successfully deliver a “wow factor” to their customers are creating compelling reasons for those customers to rave about them long after they’ve moved into their homes.
The strategy of delivering wows needs to be fully understood before the concept can fully benefit your business. For starters, a wow alone is unable to produce customer delight. In addition, a wow will not generate success when implemented as a recovery tactic for failure to meet expectations on other fronts. Instead, the principle of surprise and delight must be combined with a solid ability to deliver predictability to your home buyers. Customers want the anticipated and consistent, with an occasional delightful surprise or added value mixed in. You must be able to deliver both the expected and unexpected, and this requires understanding the evolution of wows:
Musts
To a home buyer, certain expectations are so fundamental that they are unspoken and assumed; they are the “musts.” These are the most basic essentials that have little to no satisfaction potential to a customer; however, they have a high dissatisfaction potential if not met. These musts evolve over time as consumer trends or building sciences advance, and it is imperative that they are always understood. Much like the caramel and popcorn recipe in the Cracker Jacks is assumed to be edible, a home buyer inherently assumes that items such as plumbing, electrical, windows, moisture barriers, and other basic home components will perform and meet their expectations.
Wants
Unlike ”musts,” a home buyer’s “wants” are spoken, and delivering on your home buyer’s wants will help to create satisfaction. Conversely, failing to provide wants becomes a recipe for dissatisfaction and disloyalty. For today’s home buyers, wants may include Energy Star-certified appliances, a walk-in pantry, solid-surface countertops, or covered patios for outdoor living spaces. Following the Cracker Jack example, wants are what take the ingredients from being merely edible to being inherently desirable.
Wows
If you are able to predictably and consistently deliver on home buyers’ “musts” and “wants,” you have your winning formula figured out. Now you’re in position to create an exceptional customer experience by delivering “wows.” Because home buyers don’t know that wows exist, they are unspoken. As a result, wows present little to no potential for dissatisfaction and extremely high potential for customer delight. In fact, the best customer experiences often come from creating these moments of surprise and delight for home buyers.
Although wows should appear like random surprises to your customers, they should actually be part of your strategic corporate culture and well-understood by everyone in your organization. The best wows are personal, memorable, show that you listened, demonstrate that you care, and are constantly being reinvented. Delivering successful wows requires that everyone in your company focus on “connections” instead of “transactions” when working with customers.
This is a tall order and it takes “above and beyond” employee action to create a successful surprise and delightful environment for your customers. It stems from a culture of genuine caring and requires employee empowerment for execution. You must both train and empower your representatives to actively listen to your home buyers, to detect any wow opportunities that may exist, and then to act on them. In home building, trades are an extension of your team, and it is important that they also adopt this surprise-and-delight culture and create wow moments for your customers.
Putting It All Together
The foundation of customer satisfaction rests squarely on predictability and consistency. To move beyond mere satisfaction to ultimate customer loyalty requires an element of surprise and delight for customers. Indeed, it is the added value moments with customers that allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition and build brand loyalty.
There is no cookie-cutter approach to surprising customers because the entire premise of wows rests on the spontaneity, uniqueness, and genuine nature of the actions. One of the most powerful ways to engage employees in delivering successful wows is to share best practices and real-life examples with them. It also helps to remind them that you are not in the home-building business serving people, but rather in the people-serving business building homes.
Tim Bailey is general manager of AVID Canada, the leading provider of customer loyalty research and consulting to the home-building industry. Through the AVID system, home builders improve referrals, reduce warranty costs, and strengthen their brands. He can be reached at tim.bailey@avidglobal.ca.
