In the past couple of months, we’ve taken advantage of delivery services, like DoorDash, to get meals delivered to our home. From Mexican food to a fried chicken family feast from the “Cracker Barrel.”
Our recent ‘dasher,’ Ashley, did something exceptional. Any organization can learn from her actions. What Ashley did was simple (does not cost anything), yet powerful. It doesn’t require much effort to do, yet it creates a positive experience for the customer. That positive experience will reflect well on the company she represents—ensuring repeat use by the customer, in addition to any word-of-mouth promotion this would generate.
As far as we’re concerned, Ashley did her job well by delivering our food on time and in good condition—but she went even further to exceed our expectations. Immediately after she dropped the food off at our doorstep, she sent a text message to let us know that the food was delivered. She ended her text message in a way that made the interaction unique and special:
Dasher Ashley: “Congratulations to the Graduate!”
Ashley didn’t only deliver our food, but she also took the time to acknowledge the “Congrats, Grad” sign on our yard. She didn’t have to do that, but she did it anyway. That small gesture made the experience 10x better. Though our “graduate” is a 6-year-old graduating from Kindergarten to First Grade, we were thrilled that a stranger took the effort to congratulate our little graduate.
What are the things everyone can learn from Dasher Ashley?
Observe (Listen)
Relate
Connect
Observe (Listen)
Take the time to learn more about your customer. This is extremely important for businesses and organizations. You’ll need to understand your customers’ behavior and their needs. If you want them to continue buying your products or services, you’ll need to understand their needs and wants.
Observing can also provide you insights into problems that they may have. This opens an opportunity for you to provide value back to your customers. In my situation, Dasher Ashley’s observation made her aware of what’s special and top-of-mind in our household. She took advantage of the situation to deliver a thoughtful gesture that will go a long way on how we see the company she represents.
Relate
Simply gathering the information that you observed is not enough. Relating to it, or coming up with strategies to use the information, is an important part of this effort. To me, relating means understanding and immersing yourself into the information you observed, in order to create experiences around your observation.
In a sense, to relate means simply analyzing your observations. It means making sense of the information you have now, so you can appropriately interpret and articulate what the information means, and what to do with that information.
Connect
Connecting, to me, is the part where you actually put into action the strategies you’ve created during the ‘relate’ stage. Completely gathering information and coming up with a plan are simply not enough. You’ll need to execute on those plans for it to work. At this stage, you materialize all the observations and the planning that you’ve done.
This portion is where the theory, that came from observing and analyzing, is converted to practice. Dasher Ashley went full circle in her efforts by adding the unnecessary sentence in her confirmation text message.
As an organization or a team, it’s important to execute on ideas. It’s the only way to validate the efforts done by research and development. It’s also a means to boost morale that will fuel more observation and smarter analysis. In his book, “The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals,” Chris McChesney said that “we have found nothing that drives the morale and engagement of a team more than WINNING.” How can you ‘win’ if you don’t actually do the action to pursue your goal.
Crowdsourcing FTW
I hope you were able to learn from Dasher Ashley. She taught us the importance of observing, relating, and connecting with customers. Have you experienced similar instances from your everyday interactions with people around you? Did you notice some small attributes that can be scaled and replicated in larger organizations?