American author and poet Maya Angelou famously said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

That’s as good a definition of “delight” as any.

Customer satisfaction is passé; customer delight is in. But is this just clever word play or is there a difference?

Customer satisfaction expert Bart Allen Berry proposes a way to tell the difference. On his Customer Satisfaction Behavior Curve, customer delight starts at 8.75 on a scale of 1 to 10, topped only by ‘world class’ at 9.24 or more.
Delighted customers make better advocates, telling 6 to 9 others out of 10 about their experience.

So, for a business that claims to be about service and relationships, banking is surprisingly silent on customer delight. Now more than ever, when customer service levels have declined – due to overuse of technology, automation of customer care processes and poorly trained staff – and customer trust in financial institutions is still weak, banks must strive to not merely satisfy, but actually delight their customers.

The benefits are obvious. A delighted banking customer engages emotionally with the institution and its brands; such behavior is closely linked to higher product purchase, long-term loyalty and customer advocacy. What’s left to say?

Historically, small businesses have managed to delight customers by leveraging intimacy built over years of interaction. While it’s great to know customers by name or face, this is hardly feasible on a scale that banks operate at.  Banks therefore need to institutionalize the relationship by deploying systems that provide a unified 360-degree customer view equally to each front-office employee, so that customers receive the same high level of service no matter whom they’re dealing with. But it doesn’t stop at technology. Today, most banks have capable CRM systems, but not many can lay claim to customer delight.

Creating customer delight calls for strong management focus. Banks must consider carving out a separate department for this purpose headed by a “Chief Delight Officer”, with the responsibility to inculcate a culture of customer delight among employees at lower levels. In the words of Richard Branson, that means ‘…creating an environment in which they (front-end people) feel at ease “doing as they would be done by”. ’

He should know.