Surprise and Delight Your Customers: Small Business Edition

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach here with this podcast chief everything officer, Tullio Siragusa, and digital marketing rock star, Ash Maher.
In the past, we've talked about this quest for the holy grail of marketing, where your customers love you so much, they seem to do the marketing for you. It's not easy to develop, but if you've listened to our episode, you probably have now a hundred ideas or so to layer into your business.
One of the many secrets to making this happen are Surprise and Delight Marketing and Customer Service Tactics. How businesses can emotionally connect with customers by doing that little something extra and unexpected. We went into in-depth topic on this discussion last week. If you're interested in the data on why this is an extremely effective strategy or interested in the crazy neuroscience around why we as consumers are so engaged by Surprise and Delight promotions, check out our last podcast. So in that show, we talked about some of the things big brands like Chewy, Ritz-Carlton, American Express and other large corporations do. Now we want to focus on similar ideas for those Surprise and Delight tactics for small businesses.
So let's talk about some of the challenges here. Some of the common obstacles for small businesses with developing these Surprise and Delight tactics. For me, the first one that comes to mind is obviously budget constraints. You know, the Ritz-Carlton, they had an authorization up to $2,000 per customer to solve problems. You know, no management sign off needed. That's great for them and their brand. Again, they have that massive lifetime customer value that they're investing in. That's not going to fly for the mom and pop businesses or the smaller businesses out there. This is where you have to get creative, but it's totally doable. So budget issues come to mind for me, but I think that's totally just a matter of being creative and that's where our tool for this works really well is that brainstorming process. So as a reminder, we're getting close to the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Chief Marketing Officer. Get on the wait list at aicmo.io. There are 100 or so tools there that cover about a dozen different areas of helping infuse empathy and humanity into your marketing at scale. So get on that wait list as we roll this out.
Tullio, when thinking about common problems for small businesses, you know, trying to create these Surprise and Delight tactics. What are some of the challenges you see that they have to overcome?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:14)
I think the budget one is very common, but often it's actually just an excuse because there's just the biggest constraint is time. Time to actually devote to creating ways to surprise and delight your customers.
Small business are so busy just getting clients and then delivering value to those clients and the day-to-day running of the business because they run pretty thin as it is. That's stopping and strategizing and thinking about how can we better serve our clients, how can we delight them, how can we surprise them beyond the transaction they hired us to do or the product they bought from us.
It's often just tossed off into, we don't have the budget for this kind of thing. It's an easy way to get out of the work necessary. And I say this with a lot of love because we often will find the common denominator of how we get out of something to justify why we shouldn't do it. The biggest hurdle is actually investing time in it and seeing the value in doing it. And those who do it, do it well. Those who don't know the outcome they could have received because they haven't invested the time. So it's really just being proactive. In my opinion, it should be no different in how you design your product, how you design your service. It's got to be baked into the whole process. If you've got steps that you've built in terms of how you take an order and then fulfill that order and the post order follow ups.
Within that process, build into it the customer delight process. And so that's often overlooked because it's one of those things you can't really measure 100% in terms of an ROI, but if you do it, it delights the customer. So there's a long-term value and we've got some data actually we discussed that does it. So that's the biggest hurdle is just making the time for it, seeing the importance of doing it.