Working towards Delighted Clients

In a recent interview, Steve Denning, author of award-winning books like The Secret Language of Leadership, spoke about his ideas on delighting clients.

Delighting clients should be central to the future plans and strategy of any business. Delighted clients support you, buy from you, stick with you through thick and thin, are waiting eagerly for your next offering. They tell their friends and colleagues about the wonderful things you do. They act as positive information radiators, They are the core of your client base.

If you’re not delighting clients, it means you are going to have to work harder for your current clients to stay. Merely satisfied or disgruntled clients are easily picked off by competitors. When clients are not delighted, they are not telling their friends and colleagues about the wonderful things you do.

The seven most important things to do are:

1. Commit explicitly to delighting clients as your goal, not just pleasing or satisfying or serving people, or worse, merely delivering products and services.

2. Decide who your clients are and keep a sharp focus on them.

3. Work in teams that are focused specifically on delighting clients.

4. Work in an iterative fashion: delight clients early and often.

5. Explore multiple options, rather than sticking to the first thing you thought of.

6. Listen, listen, listen.

7. Give the teams a clear line of sight as to whether and how clients are being delighted.

This is a fundamentally new way of thinking about work, for most of the last hundred years, the object of a business was seen as “producing goods or services”. You still see management books and experts saying that. Whereas this is about a fundamental re-conceptualization of the goal of work: The purpose of work is to delight clients.

If we always place ourselves in our client’s shoes and ask “is what we’re doing in the client’s best interest”, we maximise our chance of achieving our ultimate goal: Delighted Clients for Life !