How can digital delight you?
Within the world of digital, most companies try to pursue delight as a way to impress customers. Few teams we have worked with can define delight, which is why we made this post.
What is delight?
Delight is a positive emotion that we all want, but is triggered in different ways for each one of us. At Drive Digital, we define delight as a joyful surprise that stops us in our tracks, in a good way.
What are examples of delight?
In the real world, delight can come from: getting to a deal you didn’t think you were going to get, some extra food, or getting work completed early and getting to go home for the day. In the digital world, delight can come from: completing something faster, when a form fills in information correctly, or you got a recommendation that was accurate. These are examples of good surprises: they make your day better, don’t cost you anything more, and put a smile on your face.
How can you make delight happen?
Here’s a few of our secrets on how we make delight happen at Drive Digital:
- Understand your audience well; really well.
- Know what tasks they want to complete and why. Bonus points if you know what information they need before, during, and after the task is done.
- Understand the context of why your audience wants to complete those tasks and related circumstances.
- Help people complete tasks quickly.
- Provide valuable messaging and offers on what your audience wants to do next and how you can fulfill it.
How can we turn frustration into delight?
Frustrating story: a member of our team recently bought tickets to a concert. They bought two tickets, and it was a really large stadium, which implied traffic was going to be a mess. And trying to find a place to park was going to be a nightmare. And they also didn’t know that they didn’t need a small clear purse to hold important items when going into the stadium – they had to go back and forth from their car to remove items, which also made them almost miss the opening act.
Same story, but with delight: a team member wants to go to a concert, and when buying tickets, they can also buy a parking pass. A few weeks before the concert, the stadium send a reminder about what they bought, and also gives information about stadium rules and logistics. On the day of the concert, they receive a more compact version that gives everything they need, including timing of traffic, how to get to the parking area, the stadium rules & regulations, and concessions & souvenirs that are available at the stadium.
Why this is delight: the stadium now communicates a simple transaction (of purchasing tickets) and providing compact, pertinent information at every step of the way. Customers now have a full experience, and related, known steps already presented to them. And now the customer can focus on the right thing: getting to the stadium and having a good time, with no hiccups.
How can we enable delight digitally?
Here’s how we can make delight in this example:
- Perform user research to understand what you customer wants to do and where hiccups have occurred.
- Connect the ticketing system to the email system to send the appropriate information.
- Connect communications along the way to your content management system to reuse content.
- Connect your CRM to these systems to further personalize the information your customer receives.
- Ask for feedback after the concert to see if you have missed anything or if customers have feedback.
And at Drive Digital, in our experience, while these steps are work, no stakeholder or development team has raised an objection to trying to create delight.