Keeping Your Customers Delighted, While Also Maintaining Your Own Sanity and Joy is a delicate balance. In this miniseries on my podcast I share some ways you can achieve this.

This first part is about Pricing. How do you ensure your products/services aren’t undervalued, but still retain your ideal clients?

Some key takeaways from this episode:

• Your own joy is as important as your customers’ happiness
• Every kind of person cannot be your target client/audience
• Defining your ideal client helps you price right
• The dangers of constant discounting and undervaluing
• Bargain hunters vs genuine supporters
• Pampering your ideal customers by overdelivering
• And more…

Listen on the embedded player below, or on your preferred podcast platform. If reading is your jam, then scroll down for the transcript. Enjoy! 🙂

“You charge your full price and then you deliver more, you deliver more than they expect. They’ll feel happy, right? They’re getting more for what they’re paying, and they will appreciate it. And that’s a good thing because you feel good too.”

Susmitha Veganosaurus – The Feel Good Factor Podcast

If this is your first time here, I invite you to find out more about The Feel Good Factor Podcast. If you think this content can help someone, do share the episode with them. I’d also greatly appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts. Ratings and reviews help the show get discovered by more people who resonate with this kind of message.

Transcript of Joyful Customer Delight Part One – Why overdelivering is way better than undervaluing

(edited for a better reading experience)

Hey gang, I’m back! So we all know how important it is for a business to have delighted customers. We need our people, our clients to be super happy, so that the business can survive, thrive, grow. So that they can spread the word about it and keep coming back.

But we don’t really consider how important it is to maintain our own level of joyfulness. It’s as important as ensuring your customers are happy. Serving your customers as well as yourself at the same time is a delicate balance. So today, I launch a mini series on the podcast. And you’re listening to part one of…

Keeping Your Customers Delighted, While Also Maintaining Your Own Sanity and Joy

So let’s start by talking about pricing. I’ve never been a proponent of discounts. I stand by this belief that discounts, if offered, must be done in a limited way, must be done very discerningly. Otherwise you’re devaluing your own product, your service, whatever it is you’re offering.

Too many discounts offered too often will only attract discount hunters. I mean, even as a customer I’m sure you face the same thing. If there’s some brand, which keeps on offering discounts, you wouldn’t probably buy from them at full price at any point of time. You’ll just wait for the next discount to come along before you make that purchase from them.

So how do you ensure that your products, your services, whatever you’re offering is still accessible to your target client? The first point to remember is that you need to define your target audience.

It may be wide – especially with conscious entrepreneurship you just want the whole world to try your product because you’re working for a greater cause. I ran a vegan business and I wanted people to taste vegan food, I wanted to normalise that. So I wanted to reach every single kind of person. I wanted everyone to try it.

But the reality is that every single person cannot be your customer. Every kind of person cannot be your customer. This gets clear when you notice that every person won’t be happy with what you offer, either at the get go before they purchase or even after.

So it serves you, as well as them, and basically saves everyone’s time, and well, keeps everybody mentally a little bit more happy, if you have a clearly defined idea or goal in your mind about who your ideal target customer is. Ideal target client, customer, audience…

When it comes to pricing, you have to have a certain range defined in your head, a certain kind of person defined in your head.

Now just because you’re targeting a certain set of people, a certain kind of person, it doesn’t mean that you’re pushing others away. Not at all. The others will come too. I mean if they love your product, if you’re offering something amazing, everybody will come, you know, or a lot of people will come to buy from you repeatedly, to spread the word about you, support you, all of that.

But the key with defining an ideal client is that when you do your pricing, your marketing, introduce new products, make changes, whatever it is you’re doing, you will be keeping that person in mind.

For example, you say that, “hey, you know my ideal client is somebody who’s aged between say 25 to 40 years old. They’re earning a certain amount, they’re able to support themselves and spend money on supporting what they believe in. On supporting good causes, businesses which align with their consciousness.” So that’s just one example.

And then you price your product according to that person. You keep their spending abilities in mind and price your products accordingly. And not just price them, you develop your products accordingly so that they match that price point.

Once you do, there might be people who say “hey, this is too expensive, this is overpriced, etc, etc.” You don’t have to be offended when somebody says this because everybody has their own capacity to pay. Some people may say it very genuinely, some people may just crib and complain about it. You know, different people deal with it in different ways. We’ve seen all kinds when we were running our business. Haha

But keep in mind that they are not the people you’re trying to please. Whoever you are trying to please, whoever’s needs you’re trying to fulfil, these people who have an issue with the pricing of your product are not that category, they don’t even come into that bracket.

I was talking about the two kinds of people, right?

So there are people who may just complain about the prices. I’ll let you in on a little secret. If ever somebody at my business asked me for a discount, I wouldn’t like it one damn bit! Haha I would not be happy about them asking for a discount because I’d feel like they’re not valuing my efforts – mine, my team’s. The kind of work that we put in, the atmosphere we provide, the food that we serve, they aren’t valuing it when they complain and they say, “Oh, give me a discount” and things like that. They try to bargain. When someone tries to bargain with you, they are cheapening your product, and I would say you shouldn’t be going down to their level.

But then there are the other people who genuinely may not be able to afford it. And who may put it in those kinds of words. When you see that somebody’s making an effort to spend with you, and they really are not in a position to pay very much, then you can oblige them in any good way that you can.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be in terms of a discount because again – discount, undervaluing, not the best idea! But you can deliver more.

You charge your full price and then you deliver more, you deliver more than they expect. They’ll feel happy, right? They’re getting more for what they’re paying, and they will appreciate it. And that’s a good thing because you feel good too.  We would spoil our regulars rotten at my restaurant, we would just give them some extra goodie, or if we tried something new we’d just share it with them. We would just make them feel really really pampered and I loved doing that!

There are people who I felt, really, they were supporting us. Whether they could afford to or not. So there were plenty who could ofcourse afford to, and they would support us. And some who couldn’t, and they would occasionally support us. And all these people, I would feel great, I would feel so good, it would fill me with so much joy to just pamper them with extra goodies, extra stuff, just out of the blue. Surprise them with things that they weren’t expecting.

That right there is a great thing to do because your customer’s delighted, and you’re also very happy, because you’ve done something good.

I used to run a jewellery store on Etsy. I would make handmade jewellery and then I would list it on Etsy for sale. Jewellery as well as these little miniature critters, all kinds of little characters made of polymer clay, I would list them out for sale.

This was a really, really long time ago, maybe 15 years ago. And at that point of time, I didn’t know much about running my own business. I was just an artist, that’s what I loved doing. I loved doing the creative side of things, and I didn’t give much thought to marketing and promotion. And these were pre social media days. There wasn’t much connection I had with my customers, much interaction, before they made the purchase.

But even back then, whenever somebody purchased something, I would always make sure that there’s a little goodie, a little extra goodie that goes to them. Every parcel had an extra goodie that would be sent to my customers. And this was not out of anything else but the fact that I was so happy they were ordering from me, they were valuing my art, that I wanted to give them a little bit more. I wanted to spoil them. And there was a lot of joy in that for me.

I saw that as time went by, people when they purchased again and again, they would say that, “I’m always looking out for that special surprise goodie of yours.”

And we saw the same thing at the restaurant too. You know, even with the deliveries, or at the end of their meal, if somebody got that extra special goodie, people would appreciate that so much more than that huge meal, which they would have already praised. But when they got that extra goodie, they would praise it so much more. They would be even more delighted and they would say, “I’m always looking forward to that little extra cookie,” that they won in the lucky dip at the end, and things like that.

Everybody loves a little freebie, a goodie, a little bit of extra. And it’s a great way to retain the value of your offering, while also making your customers really really happy.

So yeah, this is what I wanted to share today in part one of this series. I’m going to share plenty more tips, plenty more stories, from my experience as a business owner. As well as from the other end, you know, as the customer.

The different ways that you could maintain that delicate balance between keeping your customers delighted, while also maintaining your own sanity and joy.

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Talk to you again soon.

Transcribed using Otter