When US Major Shawn Fulker who is stationed in Afghanistan, wanted to send his wife Josephine and their 5-year-old son Ethan, a pizza and gift card for her birthday he emailed their favourite pizza place the Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakery in Florida. He asked if they could deliver the pizza to their home in Jacksonville, and said that he would pay with his credit card. He didn’t hear anything from them.
Later that day, he got an email from Josephine telling him she’d received a lovely heart-shaped pizza (including heart-shaped pepperoni slices!), some balloons and a $50 gift card for Mellow Mushroom.
The Mellow Mushroom people didn’t charge a penny for it – now THAT’S customer delight!
The whole team at Mellow Mushroom had got involved: regional marketing manager Brooke Chafee, came up with the idea of the heart-shaped pizza and helped deliver it to the Fulkers’ home. Cook Justin McKeever thought of producing the little heart-shaped pepperonis.
“The only concern we had was was she going to be home?” Brooke explained “Luckily she was and she was so surprised.”
It’s a great story and demonstrates all 6 of the ingredients of customer delight:
- It produces a wow reaction!
- It appears spontaneous or unexpected!
- It’s the personal touch!
- It makes the customer feel valued!
- It’s genuine… and…
- It creates a ‘talking point’!
Shawn’s email to Mellow Mushroom demonstrates this:
“Wow, I am blown away!. My wife was crying she was so happy. Thank you so much for doing all this for me and my family. I told everyone here in my unit and we all can’t believe how generous and thoughtful your company has been”
Interestingly, his post on Facebook has already got over 10,000 ‘likes’ and there was considerable press coverage on TV and newspapers highlighting what they did too – people talk about this stuff!
So, what does this mean for you and your business? No, I’m not suggesting that you start sending free pizzas (although, obviously try it if you can!), but think about those ingredients and work out how you could make them work for the way you interact with your customers.
To help you, you may like to download Customer Delight As Competitive Advantage, our latest FREE ebook that gives you ideas, tips and tools to help you make this stuff work – you can download it here to print off or download straight to your Kindle or iPad!
Why not get a pizza in and get reading!
