When was the last time you were surprised by something? It could be anything.  It happened to me yesterday – I was preparing for a fight with someone overseas because of an undelivered parcel.  I followed the instructions on my parcel tracking email and simply replied to the email in the first instance.  At first I got what I expected – a standard response thanking me for my email and the company aimed to reply properly within 72 hours.  But then a guy called Jamie wrote an exceptional customer service email with just the right tone and the right information as to where my parcel was in the system.  And a promise to keep tracking it to make sure that the delay would not go on unnecessarily.

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As customers, as employees, as human beings – what do we actually want in our interactions with other people, with companies? I have written that success in retail starts with truly answering the questions “why” and “how”.  But in an ever-changing world, retailers will continue to succeed if they are obsessed not only with delivering a great customer experience consistently, but also with working out how to surprise customers with better value than they were expecting.  It is the most sure-fire way of creating a relationship with someone that will keep them coming back and stands a good chance of getting that person to proudly talk about their experience to their friends, virtual and real – the golden ticket of word-of-mouth marketing.

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First, retailers truly need to understand what customers value.  And by value, I mean the combination and trade-off between price and quality – what am I prepared to pay for what level of quality.  And it covers both the product I am buying, and the service I am receiving.

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Quality in product comes in many guises.  Does it need simply to look good? Does it need to last for a long time? Do customers care that it has been sourced well?  Do they care that it has been crafted expertly and are they prepared to pay for that?  Or does it simply need to be new and available to me before anyone else has it?

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Quality in service also comes in many shapes and sizes.  Is it all about speed, convenience and ease of use (ever quicker and more precise delivery slots)?  Or is it about advice, expertise and experience (ever-more immersive store experiences)?  If something were to go wrong, how important is it that I can put a face to the name of who is going to fix my problem?  And can they fix it quickly? 

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The important thing to note here is that one size does not fit all. Different customers will demand different levels of quality of service for the same product.  The same customers will demand different levels of product quality at different times.  Retailers need to provide the options that customers can choose from. 

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Once we really know what customers value, and worked out how to deliver to that, then the key thing is to focus on how to exceed expectations – the food discounters were in the UK market for quite a while before their growth took off – only once there was clear blue water on price between them and the main supermarkets (partly on own goal from the incumbents), and equally once the discounters had worked out how to create a British supermarket experience instore, did they finally make strides in the UK market. 

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I remember we ran a direct mail campaign at Sainsbury’s Bank to celebrate our 10th birthday – we offered a bottle of Prosecco to all our customers who had been with us since the beginning.  We were worried that our campaign would simply remind many customers they had some money with us and promptly withdraw it.  But it was the most successful campaign we ever did because people simply were not expecting a thankyou present from us, and they rewarded us with their continued loyalty.

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The issue retailers have, of course, is that customer expectations are being upgraded ever more frequently as someone somewhere provides a better service.  What was surprising last week is expected this week, copied next and so we need to move on to the next thing.

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That is now the cost of doing business - enabling every team within your organisation to challenge themselves to do the unexpected and surprise their customers.