Instead of a "good" experience, start creating delight
Delight can be big or small. The surprise when something is easier than it used to be, or than it was at the last company you worked with. Or the feeling you get when you got more than you thought you would receive.
There are a plethora of materials already on the subject of the value of customer and employee experience. In my work, I’ve helped clients with customer experience, employee experience, even student experience. This work is a natural outcome of several other disciplines. On the customer side, there is branding, marketing, customer service, and product development (among others). On the employee side, there are human resources, talent branding, and information technology (IT). Experience touches everyone, and thus it requires a cross-disciplinary approach in order to really get it right.
Great experience translates into many things: happier employees who stay in an organization longer while being more productive, happier customers who buy more products or services, and who tell others they should buy even more. These are a couple of examples but there are many more, and increased product sales and employee retention are realistic outcomes of improving the experience.
What about delight? On one hand, it seems like a strong term to use when the service you sell might be rather mundane. Is it possible to delight a B2B customer who is purchasing a rather commoditized service?
You can probably guess my answer to this because I wouldn’t have written a book called digital delight if I didn’t believe that this is possible in many situations.
Delight isn’t always about the product itself, but it can be about the way the process of acquiring it made you feel. Or maybe it’s the relief of knowing that when you have to call to get help or return the product, the process was built around helping you solve a challenge and not to save money for a department within a company.
Delight can be big, or it can be very small. The surprise when something is easier than it used to be, or than it was at the last company you worked with. Or the feeling you get when you got more than you thought you would receive.
Delight can be fleeting, or it can leave a lasting impression. While we can sometimes take personalized experiences for granted, companies can still go the extra mile to put themselves in our shoes and give us something we never thought to ask about.
Or as an employee, delight can be knowing there is the flexibility to, as a parent, take the time you need to with your children, or learn more about a field you have an intellectual interest in. As we’ll discuss later in the book, employees can only be motivated so much by money or other superficial perks. Finding ways to delight your employees means you can keep them engaged and motivated without continually throwing money at the issue.
Delight can be digital, or it can be analog or IRL (in the real world). While the scope of this book is mostly within the digital realm, don’t relegate your thinking to only what can be achieved digitally.
Finally, delight can be spontaneous, or it can be designed as part of a holistic experience. While spontaneous events are great, truly successful company cultures for employees and customer experiences for consumers are the product of a good amount of intention. Let’s endeavor to go beyond simply “good” experiences and start to create delight.