Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down what makes customer experience remarkable, using Zappos, Amazon, Ritz-Carlton, and Mandarin Oriental as examples. The core idea: genuinely caring about customers matters more than any tactic. They also explain why employee experience directly shapes how customers feel.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about the secret to delivering a remarkable customer experience.
So the thing with customer experience is if you really want to create amazing experience that your customers love, you have to really care about them. That's the secret. I know that sounds crazy. And silly, but do you really care about your customers? Yeah, you may say you care about your customers because you want them to spend more money, you want them to refer more people, but do you really care about them? A good example of a company who cares about their customers is Zappos. They go so above and beyond to delight their customers. From doing things like doing next-day air shipping or 2-day air shipping instead of ground, Just for fun because they're saying, thank you for shopping at Zappos. To if people are unhappy with their shoes, even though they wore them, they'll still take the return. They did all of this because their main goal was to delight their customers. They truly cared about them, and that's why they grew into a big company. Everything was revolved around making customers extremely happy, not because they want to make more money, But because they cared about them and indirectly that caused their revenue to go up.
If you look about— so Neil just talked about Zappos for a second and Amazon bought Zappos a long time ago. And Amazon is known for first and foremost thinking about customer experience. And Jeff Bezos is famously known for saying to people that, well, your margin is my opportunity. And over the years, even though Amazon has not turned much of a profit and now it's kind of changing, Well, look, it's always been about customers. It's always been about how do you build logistical technology, technological kind of changes, make those changes to help customers even more. So, when I think about it, here's an anecdote I can share. When I was in Japan a couple of months ago, I stayed at this hotel called the Prince Gallery, which is really nice. And it was remarkable because every little detail was taken care of. Like, they looked at every little thing clearly. So, when I would come back in the evening, everything would be set up for me. The lighting was perfect at my place.
Yeah.
I don't know if they're called kimonos. They're not kimonos, but like the kind of going-to-sleep robes. I don't even know what they're called in Japan. But, and there's like macaroons and all that kind of stuff. But it just made me feel special, right? Made me feel like a million bucks. And that was, well, it's remarkable. Sometimes you don't need to go that far, but when you go the extra mile, like, I'm going to talk about it to everyone. And look, word of mouth goes a long way and more people are going to stay there. I actually had one friend that stayed there recently because I told them about it. So, Think about how you can create a remarkable experience. I actually just looked into something recently where I found out that the Ritz-Carlton does training, management training on customer experience, customer excellence, all this other stuff, and you can actually send your team there. You will pay a good amount of money for that, but look, if that's— if this stuff is important to you, well, this kind of investment, yes, it is a lavish kind of business expense. Check out our last couple episodes ago, we talked about lavish business expense. This is one of those things that's worth it because you're trying to invest in the long term.
Funny enough, bringing up hotels, I used to stay or live in the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. One day I had a huge package that came and it was in the back room because I was gone, I was traveling, and I came back and I saw all the notes that they had for their own employees. And some of them were things like, greet the guests by their last name. Never say no to a guest, always try to please them. And I had a guest who stayed at my home one time. I don't know if it was you or Dhaval, and one of you guys or either of you forgot your Apple charger.
Mm-hmm.
We called down because I didn't have one at the time. And they said, no problem, Mr. Patel, we'll have one in 30 minutes. And I remember in 30 minutes, they didn't come with the charger. And they called back and they said, sorry for the delay. We couldn't find one here. We went to the Apple Store to buy you one. You should have it within 10 minutes. I'm so sorry. And I'm like, they're sorry? They went and got me a charger for free, right? They didn't even charge me for it. That's amazing service. And they didn't do it for the tip or anything like that. They did it because they truly cared. And I had such an amazing relationship with the staff there that I used to give them food and bring down like smoothies and drinks because they would be waiting outside in the heat, right?
Like the valet people.
And that all comes down to because they truly care to service people.
Yep. I think in the past, I mean, we talked about getting started with marketing and all that. Yeah, you can start with affiliate marketing, but the problem with, with these, why we don't think it's as long-term is because when you're doing this kind of stuff, you're really doing it for yourself. Not saying affiliate marketing or performance marketing is wrong, but when you build your own service, when you build your own product, you really get to define the customer experience. The entire journey, everything that happens, and also not just creating customer— a good customer experience is going to help you for the long term, but also how do you create a good employee/team member experience too? Because that's also going to help your customers in the long term. You have happy team members, you're going to have happy customers.
Yeah.
And Eric pretty much nailed everything as well as I did.
That's it for this episode.
For our daily marketing giveaway, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
