The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer satisfaction through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring satisfaction, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it through innovation, focused product development and service design.

First, A Little Context

Businesses have begun to realise that the lofty goal of customer satisfaction might in fact be a red herring. A satisfied customer isn’t necessarily a loyal customer; today’s satisfied customer might find even more satisfaction in your competitor’s offerings tomorrow. And so we’ve started to see the rapid diffusion of tools like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Experience Score (CES) and Voice of Customer (VOC) which try to quantify loyalty and satisfaction. Such measures are popular because they track behaviours that create economic value: a customer recommending your brand to a friend, or a customer returning to buy from you again. But measuring loyalty and satisfaction doesn’t create either.

Satisfaction Can’t Be Manufactured

Customer satisfaction towards products, services and organisations is a sense that grows within customers based on the series of notable interactions they have. These companies impress, please, and stand out in the minds of their customers through repeated, notably great experiences.

‘Wow’ Engenders Loyalty

Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of ‘wow,’ when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer. Suddenly a little part of your life is easier, because of the product and or service delivered. This delightful surprise resonates because it feels tailored to your needs.

Great service organisations are driven by empathy for their customer. Service Experience Designers learn empathy by spending time in the lives and environments of real customers, then simulating the experiences that people will have with new offerings through service and product development and prototyping.

Deep customer insights and empathetic service design pave the pathway to wow moments. By diving deep into a customer’s life and closely observing their behaviours, you can wow your customer by addressing needs that they’d never be able to articulate. By immersing yourself in the customer’s wider world of emotion and culture, you can wow them by attuning the offering to practical needs and dimensions of delight that normally go unfulfilled.