Five lessons from Charles Dickens on how to build customer expectations and deliver on your promise.
Charles Dickens was and still is one of the most loved and most read of English authors. Both young and old can find always something in his body of work that resonates powerfully with what it feels like to be human, to be someone on the lookout for happiness:
BUILDING GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
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- Don’t overcomplicate
Very few of Dickens’ stories are very complicated and difficult to follow. By keeping it simple and finding a good arch to your story, you know what you are doing and what you need to deliver. ‘Simple’ isn’t easier to do right, but it is a lot easier for your customer to relate to. Here’s Kurt Vonnegut telling you why the shape of your story is so important. - Connect to something real
Whatever you are selling, if you don’t make a connection to a real human setting, dream or problem, you will never build great customer expectations. Any story you tell must find resonance in the hearts of your customers and it must not feel phoney. Don’t be a Scrooge – but be someone who sees that what Scrooge needs to do is to become a better person. Find the real story in your product and tell that. - Be funny and true
Micawber in David Copperfield is unintentionally funny, but intentionally so as designed by Charles Dickens. A man of few means but many words, Mr. Micawber has his heart in the right place. We’ve all met someone a bit like him, someone who is too good for this life and whose misery is both comical and deeply sad – and whose final happiness makes us so happy. Being funny can only work if there is a real sense of truth and consequence in the equation.The Dollar Shave Club have managed to do both in their very funny but still very true video ad
As Mr. Micawber says: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”Funny and true. - Give people what they want
Charles Dickens is popular because he always gave readers what they wanted more of: more misery that turns into happiness, more loveable characters, more childhood, more bad guys that get what they deserve, more love-plots, more humour, more life.In other words: don’t give people the company line, the executive drivel, the stuff that only old boring men and women can think up. Don’t think that anyone else in the world sees your product the way you do.Find out what people want to know about your product and tell them that! - Reveal just enough at the right time
The greatest expectations are built by holding back information, telling a story little by little, creating a want and a need to stay tuned. Dickens’ novels where all serialised and the way they now read as novels still give us the pleasures of something being slowly uncovered – stories that you need to hear the end of.Like Apple’s (formerly) famous release demos, you should know that just enough info at the right time is ten times as powerful as all of it dumped in one go.