When were you last WOW’d as a customer? For me it was an hour ago and part of the ingredients for a “WOW” usually includes the unexpected.

So, someone in my world had their car stolen yesterday. I needed to contact Linkt to have the e-toll tag reported stolen, and see if the thief was foolish enough to use a toll which may give police useful photos.

I braced myself for a long call, as you do when needing to dial the likes of a government department or Telstra. My expectations were fairly low – I was just doing a routine chore created by someone else’s wrong-doing. I wasn’t on hold for long (the phone record says 11 minutes include issue resolution) and was helped by Roland.

After identification and me explaining the issue Roland then said “We have a policy that you can lose a tag once without being charged so I’ll pop the $15 back onto your account”. WOW!!! How good’s that? It’s the right thing to do of course, but it’s so long ago I’d forgotten that I’d even paid for the dongle so to have that happen is terrific.

Obviously it’s company policy and he was following a script and system. Importantly though he was well engaged with me. In a 2015 study “The effect of exceeding expectations on future service encounters in B2B relationships” Karen Stanton from Southern Cross University stated “Failure of business owners and managers to understand the consequences of above-expectation delivery has the potential to result in the development of customer-service strategies that are inefficient and ineffective.” So, even though a “wow” experience is terrific, it’s not necessarily all good in the long term, apparently. I’m certainly not focussing on that today!

Today I’ll appreciate what Sir Richard Branson says which is “The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not to just meet them but exceed them preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”

How can you do that today in your world?