How to Enchant Customers & Employees…according to Guy Kawasaki

Increasingly, the experience is the product.

The experience a customer has when they unwrap their purchase or get to personalize the music on hold or chuckle at the sheer number of dog puns in a piece of marketing (BarkBox: You lucky dog! We paw-pick the best toys for your pawchus.) is how you reach customers’ hearts and provide the emotionally-charged memories that garner loyalty.

Customer experience, in some ways, is more important than the product itself, leaving organizations scrambling to dream up ways to differentiate and enchant customers.

At our user group last week, Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist at Canva and former Evangelist at Apple, defined enchantment as “the art of changing hearts, minds and actions.” He then proceeded to model, in the wittiest of ways, his top 10 steps to enchantment. Below is the advice he gave.

Top 10 Steps to Enchantment   

1 Achieve Likability

While sitting in a speaker-ready room in Moscow, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines, approached Guy to introduce himself and see if he flew Virgin. Being a United Airlines Global Service customer, Guy honestly said he wouldn’t jeopardize his status. Branson then got down on one knee and began polishing Guy’s shoes.

Studies have shown that surprising acts that are both shocking and fill someone with happiness are the most memorable. The pure humility that Branson displayed as well as the obvious hat tip to the level of service Virgin provides, led Guy to switch airlines. To this day, Guy flies Virgin.

Guy believes that you can achieve likability with a smile that lights from the eyes, if you accept others for what and who they are, and if you always default to yes when a customer makes a request.

2 Achieve Trustworthiness

According to Guy, the key to trustworthiness is to trust others first, so they will trust you in return. You must be the giver, the baker and not the eater.

Zappos is a business built on selling shoes to people who have not had a chance to try them on or see them in person. Zappos’ business has excelled because the organization trusted that customers would not simply purchase shoes, wear them and then return them, thereby taking advantage of the free shipping on purchases and returns. They built their business on trust in their customers and in turn their customers trust them and remain loyal purchasers.

3 Achieve Excellence

Guy has been an evangelist for great products and, in his words, “crap.” In response to his success with Apple and Canva, he slyly speaks about himself in the third person: “Guy does not turn everything to Gold, Guy touches everything that is already Gold.”

He affirms that it’s much easier to enchant customers with a DICEE product.

D – Deep functionality: The company anticipates the totality of a customer’s needs and provides multiple layers of functionality.

I – Intelligent: The company understands a customer’s pain and the opportunity to sell. Ford came out with the “Mind Key,” which limits the top speed of a car with a special key, so when you go out of town and leave teenagers at home, you can still leave them the car keys knowing this technology will help keep them safer. Guy warns that you should be mindful that the key limits the top speed of the car, not how fast it gets to its top speed.

C – Complete: Great products and services are complete – it’s the totality of the customer experience, from marketing to sales to service.

E – Empowering: Great products and services make you feel more creative and productive.

E – Elegant: Someone took the time and effort to create a superior user interface and design.

4 Launch Your Product

Don’t use buzz words to talk to customers; instead, you should tell a great story and plant many seeds because every customer is important.

The founder of eBay started his organization because his girlfriend collected PEZ dispensers and needed somewhere to sell them. While this story isn’t true…it’s intriguing and memorable.

Use salient points when telling a story. If you are a non-profit trying to get funding, don’t tell customers how much more money you need to reach your goal. Instead, make it about the customer and explain what their money will buy. If you give me $500, it buys a family food for 1 year, 12 full months.

5 Overcome Resistance to Your Enchantment

In the mid 80s, there was great resistance to stocking electronic games, so Nintendo added a robot to its game and called it an educational toy. This completely changed the positioning. It got parents to ask for an educational toy to learn robotics. This is very different than “mom will you buy me a game to shoot stuff up?”.

• Provide social proof that customers love your organization; Apple did this with the white Earbud. Everyone saw each other wearing them and realized that Apple was well loved by other customers.
• Use Datasets to change a mindset. People have a pattern of thinking and assume elements are true. Use data to change customer mindsets.
• Enchant all influencers. Most purchases are influenced by peers, family and friends. In Guy’s family, his daughter is the main influencer. Make sure you enchant all influencers and not just the buyer.

6 Make Your Enchantment Endure

The Grateful Dead created a special place for hardcore Grateful Dead fans to stand and record their shows at a time when piracy was heavily debated.  They knew that the fans who pirated their music were customer evangelists. Thus, the Grateful Dead enabled them to continue to introduce more people to their music. They built an ecosystem of people who enchant on their behalf and invoke reciprocation.

7 Present Your Product or Solution

Sell your dream in a customized way. Know your customers and speak to them. For Guy, it was opening a speech in Russia, displaying the image to the right, and saying “Gosh, I didn’t know you Russians had such big balls.” It got a positive reaction out of the attendees and showed that Guy enjoys Russia and stays to sight see when he visits. Whatever it is, Guy believes that organizations should sell their dreams of what the product or service represents.

8 Use Technology

Remove the speed bumps for your customers. Sungevity, a residential solar provider, learned that customers didn’t want to book an appointment, where they had to be home and receive a stranger into their house to survey for an estimate. So, Sungevity removed the speed bump. Now, they ask for your home address and they look you up using Satellite imaging. They know which way is Southwest, how big your house is, how much power you can get and the estimated cost. Now, it’s easy for the customer. The customer just has to go to the website and give their home address.

9 Enchant Up

If your wife asks you to do something, drop everything else and enchant up.

If your boss asks you to create a PowerPoint, show up in 2 hours with a prototyped version to ask if you are on the right track. The faster you come back with a prototype, the longer you have to fix and make everything perfect.

10 Enchant Down

In the book Drive, Daniel Pink educates readers on how a MAP can enable employee enchantment. With MAP, you let employees…

• Master – Master new skills
• Autonomy – Work Autonomously and independently. The organization empowers action; it trusts employees to do the work without micro-management.
• Purpose – Work towards a higher purpose. The organization has higher level goals than simply making a buck – it seeks to empower people and allow them to realize their dreams.

Guy’s 10-step guide to enchantment provides the concepts that can enable any organization to improve the way they engage their customers. It provides employees tools to create a more collaborative and meaningful work culture, and it provides people a way to better engage with one another in all aspects of life.