Key Ingredient For Success: Surprise and Delight

Well, Fat Tuesday – or Mardi Gras – is here, which brings with it Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season. No more King Cake around soon.  

As you may know, the King Cake tradition sees a party host hiding a small plastic baby somewhere inside a dessert pastry. Finding the baby in your slice of cake is said to bring luck and prosperity. You are declared “king” or “queen” for the day.

I’ve always liked this tradition – it’s great fun. But I think it holds a lesson for us as small business owners too.

The power of surprise and delight.

Everyone loves to feel special. If you get the lucky slice of cake – surprise! – and everyone makes a fuss over you, that gives you a rush of good feelings. It’s nice to feel like the center of attention. 

Here’s the thing: We can make those same warm fuzzies part of our customer experience.

By looking for opportunities to surprise and delight our clients, we signal that we value them and their business.

Little surprising touches stand out, too. Often, those moments are what customers recount to their friends when making a referral: “You know, she was a great math tutor for our son David. What I remember most was that she sent me a handwritten note telling me how much she cherished her time with David, and how she had seen him grow over the school year. I still have that letter!”

I can’t promise that your gestures will always have that level of impact, but science does show that people like a nice surprise. It lights up the part of the brain linked to pleasure and provides a jolt of dopamine, which triggers feelings of satisfaction. 

When you surprise and delight your clients, you are literally improving the “chemistry” between you and them!

Maintain the element of surprise.

Consider your customers’ experience with you for a moment. Where can you underpromise and overdeliver? Are there moments when your clients might be stressed out…and you call them with reassurance, or even mail them a stress ball? Where can you celebrate with them? When can you touch their heart in a meaningful, genuine way?

You can surprise and delight with gestures big and small. A few cost money. But many rave-worthy touches cost you nothing.

Just to get your juices flowing, I’ll offer several ideas here. But I want to hear from you too! 

Watch for my Insta post on surprise and delight. Reply there with your ideas for memorable, unexpected moments in your customer experience. The 17hats community gets stronger when we all share our best practices.

Here are a few thought-starters:

• Personal notes. Thank you clients for allowing you to help. Also, even in today’s digital age, handwritten notes still have an impact. Make your notes as genuine and personal as you can. It doesn’t have to be grand prose, but it should aspire to make a human connection.

• An unexpected call. Here, timing matters. A call to nudge a client who’s late in paying you won’t surprise or delight that customer. But if you provided a service for a couple’s wedding and you call them, unprompted, on their one-year anniversary to say congrats, that will stand out. Even supplying “service after the sale” will set you apart from the crowd. (Sad to say, we’ve all experienced the opposite, where, say, a car salesman is all ears before the sale goes through but can’t be reached for a question once the ink on the contract dries! Grrr.)

• Bonus extra. This is something to think about when you’re creating your pricing packages. How can you add surprising and delightful value in the way you set up those pricing tiers? Is there something that you can include – for free, or at a steep discount – with the more expensive packages? Circling back to the Mardi Gras theme that I started with, they have a word for this “bonus extra” in Louisiana: lagniappe. Now you know what to call that free 13th donut the baker includes when you buy a dozen.

• Gifting. At 17hats, we have long sung the praises of gifting as a means of demonstrating your appreciation to clients. (See more here and here.) As the saying goes about gifts, it’s really the thought that counts. It doesn’t have to be something pricey. Instead, see if there’s not something meaningful that can tie into your relationship. Even something fun – a tin of peach-flavored Jelly Belly® jelly beans, for example – can be touching if you remembered those are your client’s favorite candy from an offhand remark she made three months ago. 

• Referrals. Yes, you can surprise and delight clients with referrals too. First, make sure that you are referring top-drawer colleagues who you know will deliver a five-star experience. That alone may delight your customers; after all, you’re saving them valuable time trying to find a good dog groomer or balloon artist or whatever the referral is. What about the surprise factor? Maybe work out a reciprocal agreement with a friend: When you refer each other, you’ll agree to extend a “10% friend-of-a-friend discount” to each other’s clients. That offers a nice surprise savings to start off a new relationship on the right foot.

Extraordinary = more than the ordinary.

We all seek to deliver an extraordinary experience for our customers. But think about that word for a second: extraordinary literally means something out of the ordinary.

So look for ways to surprise and delight your clients with something unexpected. (And, by all means, share your ideas with the 17hats community on Insta.) 

Finding ways to connect with customers in a meaningful way may bring you prosperity…even if you don’t find the plastic baby in your slice of King Cake!