How product teams can create customer delight (and why it matters)

More than a buzzword, customer delight is a way for product teams to create an enduring competitive advantage. But we know it can feel a little nebulous and hard to define. Below, we guide you to a better understanding of customer delight, including how Hotjar can help you measure and improve it. We cover:

• What does 'customer delight' mean?

• Why does customer delight matter for product teams?

• How to measure customer delight

• How Hotjar can help product managers measure and improve customer delight

What does ‘customer delight’ mean?

Creating customer delight is the practice of exceeding customer expectations—of going above and beyond customer satisfaction in a way that encourages an emotional connection and sense of loyalty between customers and your company.

Enabling your customers to accomplish their goals is no longer a competitive advantage. Today, brands have to go a step further, by focusing on customer needs, interests, and wants above all else.

Brands need to create a sense of goodwill and connection between customers and their product by making products that are remarkably easy, quick, and enjoyable to use; products that provide even more value than customers expect.

Customer satisfaction vs customer delight

Customer satisfaction is about meeting customer expectations and solving their problems with relative ease, in a satisfactory way, in the manner and time frame they expect.

Put another way, customer satisfaction is the foundation for customer delight and loyalty.

Customer satisfaction is more quantitative, often measured using metrics like

• Customer Satisfaction Score

• Net Promoter Score

• Customer Retention Rate

• Customer Effort Score

These metrics help you establish a baseline for whether you’re meeting customer expectations and helping them accomplish their goals in an effortless way—which you have to do before you can go a step further toward delight.

Customer delight is more subjective and fluid, and requires qualitative ways to be measured and understood—often through user research and voice of the customer (VoC) feedback.

Why does customer delight matter for product teams?

Given the qualitative nature of customer delight, it can be hard to communicate how important it is for your business. When hard numbers like NPS don’t tell the whole story of customer delight, how do you convince your team to focus on it?

Here are four reasons why customer delight matters for product teams:

1. Delighted customers don’t leave, so emphasizing delight reduces churn and protects recurring revenue.

2. A delighted customer base is a buffer against your competition: competitors can copy your features and match your price, but can they delight your customers?

3. Delighted customers give you useful and usage data and may be more likely to give thoughtful feedback that supercharges product-led growth.

4. Customer delight turns customers into your biggest advocates—people who recommend your business to others and help grow your customer base.

Customer delight examples: big and small ways to foster delight

Delighting your customers doesn’t have to come from huge brand efforts—it can, but there are plenty of smaller, more approachable ways to build customer delight. Here are a few big and small ways you can delight your customers:

👇 Small ways to delight customers

1. Build a product that’s seamlessly easy to use

2. Proactively solve customer problems

3. Shepherd customers to their Aha! moment as quickly as you can

4. Get them invested: share your roadmap publicly and accept suggestions

5. Get to know customers on an anecdotal basis

6. Celebrate their wins

7. Personalize your product to add a personal touch

8. Communicate and listen when customers talk to you

👇 Big ways to delight customers

1. Live your customers’ values

2. Anticipate: solve the problems customers don’t even know they have

3. Build a truly customer-centric product strategy

4. Invest in educational resources to help customers self-serve

5. Work together with customer success teams to help customers achieve their goals

6. Create a consistent experience across every touchpoint and channel

7. Offer meaningful customization options

8. Put a system in place that allows your team to recognize customers across channels and platforms

9. Build a community of customers

4 ways product teams can humanize their strategy

Humanizing your product strategy means going beyond the numbers: looking past usage data and retention statistics, and trying to understand the user experience, customer behavior, and the why behind it.

While that’s easy to say, it’s not always easy to do—and it’s definitely not always easy to know where to start.

Here are four tips for going beyond quantitative data and humanizing your strategy:

1. Make ‘customer-centric’ and ‘customer-obsessed’ more than buzzwords. Plenty of companies claim to be those things without walking the walk. If you’re going to delight customers, you need to make customer-obsessed your mantra for day-to-day work.

2. Focus on what the user actually needs, not the trendy, flashy features you’re excited about. It’s easy to get excited about flashy new technology, industry trends, and long-term builds, but those should never distract you from delivering what your users actually need and want from your product.

3. Look to customer feedback, user behavior, and VoC data. It takes a little longer to analyze qualitative feedback, but this is where the most useful insights live. Customers who offer this feedback are handing you a playbook for how to delight them—use it.

4. Don’t overlook the small ways you can create customer delight. Just like the examples we mentioned before, there are tons of ways to delight customers and they’re not all huge undertakings. Don’t lose sight of the smaller, quick fixes that can delight customers while you work on bigger picture projects.

How Hotjar can help product managers measure and improve customer delight

When it comes to measuring and improving customer delight, understanding and improving the user experience (UX) is a great place to start: an effortless user experience is part of the foundation for customer delight.

This is where behavior analytics and product experience insights tools can help, giving you insight into user behavior and revealing their likes and dislikes, points of friction within the customer experience (CX), and their blockers and pain points.

Start with:

• Heatmaps which help you identify and eliminate friction and improve UX so you can build customer delight on top of a product that’s already easy to use.

• Session recordings, to deepen your understanding of blockers and pain points, build empathy for the customer, and humanize your roadmap.

Then, use surveys and user feedback tools to gather VoC data that brings customer voices into your product strategy. Here's how to use Hotjar's Survey and Incoming Feedback tools to measure and improve customer delight:

Surveys

There are two ways to approach customer surveys and each has its place in measuring customer delight:

On-site surveys

To get feedback from users who are currently in your product. These triggered surveys appear on-page, and give product managers feedback on specific aspects and elements of your product or site, capturing in-the-moment details and experiences from real users.

External link surveys

To follow up with customers and collect more detailed feedback. Invite users to participate in off-site surveys, and give them more time to respond to detailed questions about their experience in your product. This kind of feedback can help you gauge the lasting impression users have of your brand and product.

How product teams can use surveys to measure and create customer delight

Budget airline Ryanair uses Hotjar Surveys at several points in their customer flow to better understand

• Ease of use

• User satisfaction

• Barriers to purchase

They started with open-ended questions that allowed customers to provide unfiltered feedback in their own words.

Once they had a better understanding of the barriers customers faced and how they spoke about them, the team moved to closed-ended, multiple-choice surveys to help validate and prioritize product changes.

User feedback

Gathering user feedback on an ongoing basis can help you identify new ways to delight your customers. It helps your product team understand how customers are feeling about certain parts of the product experience (PX), and can help you identify new features and fixes to prioritize.

When placed throughout the product, an Incoming Feedback widget like Hotjar's lets customers express frustration and delight by highlighting specific elements of a page, rating how those elements make them feel with emoticons, and (optionally) adding written feedback. That feedback helps you address and remove blockers and identify and repeat what works.