BJ Fogg's Weblog

How to delight customers

This morning I went outside to retrieve the New York Times in my driveway. Walking back to my house, I noticed a brown box sitting by my door. When I saw the box said "Amazon," I experienced a moment of delight.

Ah, delight! -- that sweet, happy spark. Delight makes you smile inside. Delight makes you feel -- at least for a moment -- that everything is right in the world.

My company just launched a new Internet service, so I'm thinking a lot about how users are responding to YackPack. Of course, I want people to feel our service is easy to use and visually appealing. But when it comes to emotional response, I'm shooting for the tippy top:  I want YackPack users to be delighted.

Delight is the king of customer emotions.

A few months ago I spoke at the WebVisions Conference. In preparation, I created a graphic to explain the concept of delight and related emotions. (Click on the image to see the graphic I shared.)

My "Diamond of User Emotion" graphic requires a good bit of explaining, but here's the short version: When people pursue a goal and achieve greater benefit with less cost than expected, that's when they experience delight.

For example, consider my recent "Amazon moment of delight." A few days ago Mark Grimes suggested I read The Naked Corporation. So I ordered the book on Amazon and forgot about it. This morning I experienced delight because two things happened:

• The book arrived faster than I thought it would. So my time cost was lower than expected.
• I discovered the book Sunday morning, the only flexible day in my week. So my benefit is higher than expected.

In a nutshell, here is my recipe for delighting customers: (1) make the task easier than expected and (2) make the reward better than expected.

Whenever we do these two things, we don't simply satisfy our customers . . . we delight them.

A Report from YackPack Headquarters

The Bad News . . . We're six hours behind schedule.

The Good News . . . No salty tears, no broken bottles, no rolling heads.

The Best News . . . We just launched!

Giving up my dog for YackPack

Today we start sharing YackPack with the world. To arrive at this point, I've made some hard decisions:

• Should I continue my consulting work? (No)
• Where should we headquarter the company? (wine country, not Silicon Valley)
• How much of my life savings should I devote to the venture? (Most of it -- ouch!)

The hardest decision I made was also the most personal: I gave up my dog.

After buying a small home four years ago, I was finally able to get any pet I wanted. I choose an Australian Shepherd puppy and named her Kaya. We bonded. At that time I worked mostly from home, and Kaya always sat near my feet. When I got weary from the computer, we would go outside for frisbee. Ironically, Kaya was with me when I started researching what would become YackPack. When I had to leave to do user research, we greeted each other on return. You get the picture: Kaya and I were tight.

Fast forward to Spring 2005 . . . my company was ready to move into a real office. No dogs allowed. I knew that Kaya would be home alone all day -- and usually into the night. She would have no place to run and no companionship. We tried various solutions, but nothing worked. One day I took some deep breaths, switched off part of my brain, and posted an ad on Craig's List.

Kaya now has a new companion, a 10-year-old named Lucy. She lets Kaya sleep on her bed.

This may be a coping mechanism, but here's how I like to think about it: I did not give away my best dog for my company. Instead, I gave up my dog to pursue my dream.

Today that dream starts becoming a reality.

Stealth mode is overrated

Last month, eight people on my startup team went to DEMOfall to announce YackPack. We wore bright green t-shirts, handed out new business cards, and demonstrated YackPack over and over and over. We had a blast, and the outcome took us all by surprise.

But for me the biggest surprise was how I felt deep inside: liberated, unleashed, unchained.  At long last, I was free from the prison of stealth mode. And it felt sooooo good.

Since the fall of 2002, as soon as my book went to press, I started devoting my time to one question: How can technology help us stay connected with people who matter most?

This question became something of an obsession. I started reading and researching everything I could to find the answers. In addition to the many academic papers and the  books I read, I talked to aunts at family reunions, colleagues at parties, and strangers in airports. No one was off limits. Who matters most to you? How do you keep those relationship alive? What role does technology play?

In the process people opened their lives to me. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that staying connected to people who matter most was getting harder, not easier. The anecdotal evidence was growing each day. So in April of 2003, I formed a corporation and started formal research to solve this problem.

Then I made a mistake: I decided to operate the company in stealth mode.

I remember two people advising me against stealth. First, one of my students, Manu Kumar, said stealth was a bad idea. As we talked after class, he explained how working in the open was a better strategy. I knew Manu was smart and savvy, but I didn't believe him (sorry, Manu).

Later I had dinner with Jerry Michalski at an Italian place just off Highway 101 in Marin. Jerry explained how I could address this question -- and run the company -- with an open source mentality. I didn't get it. I didn't really understand open source, and I just didn't understand Jerry's vision.

To be fair, many people said stealth was the right way to go. In fact, most people did. And this mode was familiar to me, because while finishing my Ph.D., I also worked at Interval Research, Paul Allen's super-secret thinktank in Palo Alto.

So I chose stealth mode. In retrospect, this was my company's first big mistake.

Fortunately, the future of YackPack still looks bright. We're all excited about what's coming. But I'm  convinced that had I listened to Manu and Jerry, my life would have been easier. And I'm convinced YackPack would already be in the world, with millions of users connecting richly with friends, family, and colleagues. As it stands now, we hope to launch our beta tomorrow with a limited "invitation-only" rollout. There's a big difference between a few hundred users in beta and what could have been.

In growing my company from a research question to a launched internet service, I've learned an important lesson: Stealth mode is overrated.