Customer experience by Santa 🎄🎅🏻

What Santa Claus Can Teach Us About Customer Experience

17/12/2024; 4 min to read

Why can't children sleep the night before Christmas? Apart from being excited about the gifts, it's also due to the fascination with the big white-haired figure, Santa Claus, who is expected to come down their chimney.

Whether you adore him or reluctantly acknowledge him, one thing is undeniable: Santa Claus has crafted a legendary customer experience over the years. Yet, unlike anyone else, Santa offers an experience that makes him a master at attracting and retaining customers, and this article will explain why. 

Know your customer 

The 1934 Christmas classic “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” includes these lines:

• He sees you when you're sleepin', 

• He knows when you're awake, 

• He knows if you've been bad or good, 

• So be good for goodness sake.

If that doesn’t exemplify a leader eager to understand their customer base, I don’t know what does. 

Although most companies can't match Santa's extensive customer tracking methods, it's essential for organizations in 2025 to utilize the latest data analytics and AI tools to gain insights from their customer base. While these technologies won't reveal a customer's sleep patterns, they can provide vital information such as customer demographics, purchasing behaviors and history, customer journey mapping, and much more.

Santa accepts feedback 

Those letters that children write to Santa around this time of year aren't just a chance for Santa to find out their Christmas wishes; they also allow Santa to understand how past Christmases were perceived. By reading these letters, Santa willingly accepts any feedback or criticism, but he persists because he is committed to providing the experience that customers deserve.

How frequently do you gather feedback from your customers? While you may be distributing surveys, what portion of your customer base is truly engaging with them? In the current business environment, organizations need to advance further by utilizing the latest AI tools to collect customer feedback and sentiments, ensuring that every customer's feelings are considered. 

Customer advocacy

Word-of-mouth is an effective way to enhance a brand's reputation for delivering a meaningful customer experience (CX), and Santa along with his team of elves excel at this type of marketing. How frequently do you see promotions for Santa’s Workshop? Likely never, because it isn't necessary. Santa depends on his established customer base to share their experiences, and since he has already offered them a strong CX, they are eager to spread the word.

The takeaway is that by serving your current customers, you can not only keep them but also benefit from free marketing to aid in growth. 

A loyal customer base

A visit from Santa holds great significance for every child who believes in him. Receiving a gift from Santa signifies that you have been well-behaved over the past year, encouraging children to maintain good behavior to receive another visit the following year.

This strategy used by Santa enhances the customer experience at Santa’s Workshop, making it highly rewarding. The organization is designed to ensure children (customers) feel valued at every step, encouraging them to return annually. 

Santa embraces everyone

Journeying around the globe to bring gifts to millions of children in a single night is a formidable challenge, yet Santa accomplishes it because he treats everyone equally. Santa believes that every child deserves the happiness he delivers, no matter their background.

Customer journey touchpoints

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How good is Santa at Customer Experience?

I took six of the key metrics frequently being used to judge the customer experience that brands provide – here’s how Santa stacks up:

1. First Contact Resolution (5/5) Getting it right the first time is essential for an efficient and effective customer experience. Santa, with his global journey in a limited timeframe, knows this better than anyone. He cannot afford to return to fix errors, so he ensures everything is done correctly the first time, every time, through careful planning and the assistance of his elves.

2. Empathy (4/5) Everyone, including children, seeks to connect with brands that understand them and their needs. For Santa, this involves staying informed about the newest popular toys and gifts and being able to decipher children's Christmas lists, regardless of how unreadable they might be. His success in doing this annually demonstrates his skill in engaging with an ever-evolving customer base. Even if he didn't bring me the pony I requested when I was ten!

3. Speed of response (3/5) Although he is quick at delivering presents on Christmas Day, Santa Claus is much less responsive earlier in the process. After children send him their lists, there is no confirmation that they have reached the North Pole, nor any indication of their status on the Naughty or Nice lists, or whether they will receive presents. While this maintains suspense, a simple auto-acknowledgment for each list would reassure anxious children.

4. Listens to feedback (2/5) Listening to the Voice of the Customer is crucial for continuously enhancing the customer experience, and this is an area where Santa lacks. There’s no survey process for children and parents to give feedback or suggest improvements. While he might be utilizing AI and text analytics to analyze all his interactions to identify trends and areas for change, a clearer commitment to feedback would be beneficial.

5. Consistency (3/5) Distributing gifts to all the well-behaved boys and girls is undoubtedly a significant task. However, there appears to be considerable inconsistency in the types of gifts given, as well as the timing and the person responsible for delivering them.

Children all over the world eagerly await the Christmas holidays, but not everywhere Santa Claus comes with a sack of gifts on his back. In different countries, the holiday is celebrated in different ways, and some children receive... sticks, potatoes or coal instead of gifts. So, a bit of work on standardisation of practices is obviously needed.

Summing up the scores gives Santa an overall score of 68% - quite impressive for a highly pressurised organisation with limited resources and a single, strict deadline.

Considering the overwhelmingly positive response every Christmas morning, it’s clear he’s delighting his customers - demonstrating that emotional engagement is central to a successful customer experience.

If you conducted the same tests on your brand, what would your score be?

Enjoy!

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