Delighting the Customer

4 Pages 975 Words

DELIGHTING THE CUSTOMER: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Delight results from exceeding the expectations of satisfied customers. Meeting only current needs “locks us into the present” (“Customer Satisfaction and Beyond”, The Drucker Magazine, Spring 1995) but to move beyond the threshold of satisfaction, we must tap into the unmet and, perhaps even, unimagined needs of the customer.

The only key that can unlock this door to delight is a new way of thinking and working. For some of us keeping up or meeting the constantly changing paradigms may be difficult enough but, if we wish to surprise and, therefore, delight, we must exceed the following currently accepted standards of good service:

Providing proactive services
Knowing our own business
Better marketing
Over-delivering
Following best practices
Beating the competition
Managing change
We have been warned of the perils of reactive service but few realize the pitfalls in the proactive approach. Reaching beyond expectations means providing value rich information not merely delivering more than the customer requested. Demands on customers are constantly changing and to anticipate their needs based on yesterday’s assumptions means wasting valuable time finding new information for those who no longer need it. Thus if we aim to exceed expectations, we must be prepared to run alongside. One-way contacts, whether reactive and proactive, must be supplemented by ongoing interactive or networked communication. Rather than regarding ourselves as “servants”, to remain abreast or one step ahead, we need to form partnerships of equals.

To discover customers’ unanticipated needs we must not be content to know only our own business or profession. As Davenport and Prusak advise in their article “Blow Up the Corporate Library” (International Journal of Information Management, December 1993), we need to “get out of the library and...