Delighting The Customer

Delighting the customer

The Customer Experience

Customer experience is at the heart of everything a truly great brand does. Understanding customer touchpoints and improving their performance is a great way to develop your brand and enhance your customers experience. What the hell is a ‘touchpoint?’ I hear you ask. Harvard Business Review defines a customer touchpoint as ‘any interaction point between customer and your brand’. With this in mind we can start to understand what they are and how they appear within our brands.
After a quick brainstorm session we came up with the following touchpoints, I am certain you’ll be able to add to the list but here are our results to give you a head start:
  • Social Media
  • Products
  • Packaging
  • Website
  • Email
  • Blog
  • Newsletters
  • Personal meetings
  • Pop-ups/ events
  • Phone calls
When we think of building our brand it is easy to focus on the obvious touchpoints: product, website and social media – these efforts are directly correlated with increasing awareness and generating customers therefore we get narrow in our vision seeing only the immediately tangible. In an ever-evolving marketplace where companies are vying for attention, improving the customer experience at every touchpoint can be a real opportunity for differentiation and brand loyalty.
The list above is long and worthy of paperback book. So let’s focus on packaging for now and compare two very different experiences.

The bad

I’m sure we can all remember receiving an order for a product from an online store for an ugly looking, plain packet to turn up – sure the product could be great but we aren’t enthused by the unboxing or materials included. We instantly screw the packaging up and never think about it again – an opportunity to add more value to us, the customer has disappeared.

The good

Contrast this with receiving an eye-catching, sustainably packed product which, when opened, reveals a hand-written note from the founder thanking us for the support along with some tips about how we can make the most out of using the product. Nailed it, we instantly love the company. Which are you more likely to shout about, tell friends, post on social media and order from again?

Some cool examples

Check out these brands and the creative ways they go about delighting the customer beyond the product itself:
Harry’s Shave Club: https://www.harrys.com/
  • Very consistent fun and light hearted messaging across the brand
  • Unboxing is an experience
  • Highly thought out packaging layout (we recommend trying the tester offer on the website just to experience the packaging alone)
  • Encouraging social sharing upon unboxing
  • Unboxing becomes an event in itself
  • Excellent packaging design and brand consistent language

Our experience

Our eCommerce store serves as a medium for individuals to purchase samples with the view to building a full clothing range from us. We used to ship each order is a lifeless, dull plastic mailing bag we had purchased from eBay – it was cheap and did the job, right? Every single order that leaves our facility now features our streamline; Unleash Your Brand along with a quirky attempt at humour by Marc in regard to the fun fact featured on there. Not so sure of the humour value but all going aside, we have had an array of positive comments around the packaging and its reflection on us as a brand and the values we hold.
To summarise, we can enhance the ‘packaging’ experience at a number of levels:
  • The physical design/ appearance of the box/ package
  • The arrangement of the items inside
  • The wrapping of the items inside
  • The extras – hand written notes, stickers etc
  • Level of thought placed into the package as a whole
  • Do they care about me?
  • Further benefits – discount codes, offers similar/ related products
We strongly recommend listing out all of your touchpoints, beyond just packaging discussed here and brainstorming ways to improve each and every one. Some ideas may be expensive or hard to implement, you can work on these over time but I bet you will identify a bunch of easy to implement ‘quick wins’ to delight your customer :).
Gymfuse Packaging

2 thoughts on “Delighting The Customer

  1. Warwick Davids says:

    I have been paying with this idea in regards to making an exceptional experience for my brand, not in the fitness sector mind.
    Have you thought about QR codes to enhance experience?

    • gymfuse says:

      Great comment regarding QR codes. The usage of QR codes appears to be very strong in Asia, the uptake in Europe appears to be a little less. I personally think they’re a fantastic way of interacting with a static environment and could work brilliantly within certain target demographics.

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