Understanding delighters and their role in customer satisfaction

One of the main challenges in product management is prioritizing the most important and impactful changes to the product. You typically do that by estimating the business impact of a product and following a metric to determine whether you were successful.

But what happens when you stumble on an idea that would make the product or feature better but lacks an easily measurable business impact?

In this blog, I introduce you to the idea of adding a delighter feature to your next product. I’ll cover what a delighter is, share examples of a delighter feature, and explain the benefits it will bring you. The blog will also delineate two main ways you can add a delighter to your product.

What is a delighter?

Delighters in software product development are features or attributes that exceed customer expectations and provide unexpected pleasure or satisfaction. These elements are often surprises or gimmicks that improve user experience overall.

The key characteristics of a delighter include:

• Unexpected — Delighters go beyond the basic functionality and performance needs of the product. While they can greatly improve user experience, they are not part of the core experience
• Highly impactful — These features have a noticeably positive impact on customer satisfaction and can create a memorable experience
• Add uniqueness — Delighters can make a product unique and differentiate it from its competitors.
• Non-essential — While they add tremendous value, delighters are not required for the product’s basic functionality; their absence does not lead to dissatisfaction
• Not-fixed — Over time, what is considered a delighter can change as user expectations evolve and the market evolves

It is important to note the difference between a delighter and a satisfier. Unlike delighters, satisfiers are features or attributes that customers explicitly expect and desire in a product. For instance, the erase functionality in a graphic editor such as Paint is a satisfier.

If I were to use a food analogy, a satisfier would be your essential meal elements like protein and fiber. A delighter would be a small, tasteful dessert after the meal.

Examples of delighters

• iPhone’s Face ID — Though an unessential feature for iPhone users, Apple’s Face ID makes any identity confirmation seamless and ranks among the highest quality delighters in a product. The delighter uses a dedicated camera, which expects 3D faces and won’t be fooled by a picture. While impressive, the same can be achieved with a fingerprint reader or a more traditional password system
• Tesla’s Autopilot — This is a near sci-fi-level delighter feature that isn’t much needed when traveling in a Tesla or any car. But once it is fully live, reliable, and safe, it can offer a unique driving (or rather, the lack thereof) experience
• Amazon’s one-click ordering — This delighter feature of Amazon allows users to make purchases with a single click, streamlining the checkout process. While super attractive for users, the feature also brings gigantic additional revenue by enabling impulsive shopping
• Spotify’s Discover Weekly — This personalized playlist delighter feature is updated every week with new music recommendations based on the user’s listening habits. It helps users discover new music but is not essential for a cloud-based music player
• Google Photos’ automatic photo organization — The AI-powered feature of Google Photos automatically organizes photos by people, places, and things, making it easy to find specific images. It saves users’ time, creates unique sets of memories, and can be done manually, given time and imagination
• Netflix’s personalized recommendations — Netflix’s algorithm suggests shows and movies based on the user’s viewing history. This delighter helps “keep” users who don’t know what to watch next on the platform
• Slack’s customizable workspaces — This delighter feature lets users personalize their workspace with different themes and integrations. A clear example of “bells and whistles” that are not essential for basic functionality but add great appeal to the product
• Airbnb’s Experiences — Offering unique local experiences and activities hosted by locals, this delighter feature enhances the travel experience. While this is a delighter for Airbnb, it’s the core functionality for TripAdvisor’s subsidiary company, Viator
• Microsoft Office 365’s real-time collaboration — The ability for multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously, improving productivity and teamwork. This delighter feature became indispensable once remote work blew up after the pandemic

Importance of a delighter feature

It’s apparent from the examples that delighters play a crucial role in enhancing the overall user experience. They can significantly impact customer loyalty and help differentiate a brand from competitors. I’ll detail these benefits of delighter features:

Emotional connection

Delighters create a positive emotional response, making users feel valued, appreciated, or simply entertained (for example, a fun 404 page). This emotional connection can lead to increased engagement.

Customer retention

Delighted customers are more likely to stay with a product or service, reducing churn rates. They are also more likely to make repeat purchases or continue their subscription.

Word-of-mouth marketing

Delighted customers often share their positive experiences with others. So, they act as brand ambassadors and help attract new customers through personal recommendations.

Unique selling propositions (USPs)

Delighters can serve as a USP, setting a product apart from competitors by offering features that are not expected but highly appreciated. Highlighting such delighters during sales presentations or when a new product is being unraveled is especially important. Arguably, one could say that annual iPhone releases simply showcase new delighters.

Brand identity

Incorporating delighters can enhance a brand’s overall perception, making it appear more innovative and customer-focused. Again, Apple’s focus on privacy is a perfect example of that.

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You can create memorable user experiences that foster loyalty and differentiate their products in the marketplace by focusing on delighters.

Adding delighters to your product

Choosing whether a certain update is a delighter is easy from a process point of view. When it comes to a traditional, developing product, delighters are usually features and functionalities that appear beneficial from the user’s perspective but are unlikely to improve any high-level business metrics.

But let’s face it — it is hard to dedicate development time to delighters for a developing product. The only real incentive to do it has to do with marketing, for example, adding AI features just to ride the hype wave or to match a competitor’s offer. Doing something “for the users” is unlikely to be a good enough motivator to win with business and growth goals.

For this scenario, a product manager has two ways of adding delighters to the product:

Seek spare time to add minor delighters

This means jumping to develop delighter features if there is some time left in the sprint or, for whatever reason, no major sprint goal is set. This would likely be fun if this “spare space” wasn’t also occupied by bug fixes and tech debt repayment initiatives.

So you need to go the extra mile to convince your development team to be on board the delighters train.

Build a strategic goal around delighters and push them to the roadmap

This is pretty hard as it’s hard to translate adding such features to an immediate increase in any metrics that businesses care for. It’s more likely to be a compound effect that will slowly reduce churn and improve the average product rating over time. Of course, a delighter can also become the heart and soul of the product, just like animations and gamification are for Duolingo.

So, it’s really about finding the right arguments and language to convince your stakeholders that working on delighters is the right way to go.

Things are a tad different when it comes to mature products that have all the core functionalities in place, are appreciated by the market, and, basically, each new release comes with new delighters. This means that your whole backlog is filled with them. And it’s up to you, the product manager, to find the right metrics that will allow you to prioritize your delighter backlog items. Even in this scenario, a business-oriented stakeholder might ask whether it is necessary to keep focusing on such development and perhaps move to another business opportunity.

Following what Apple is doing with its product lineup, I guess the best answer is — why not both? Apple releases a new iPhone model each year packed to the brim with new, different delighters, but they are also looking for new markets, such as the Vision Pro.

Conclusion

Delighters are difficult for the product manager to manage. On one hand, they can define the product’s characters and give it its unique spin and edge on the market. The battle of Apple vs. Android — although about the same basic product — shows how important it is to use delighters to win the client.

On the other hand, a typical product manager working on a developing product will have so much pressure to work on the satisfiers that it’s unlikely that any major delighters will ever make it to the sprint. So, whether they should is an individual assessment for different products.

I’ll leave you with this thought — smiling while using the product can keep the user using it, but you will never be able to measure it.

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With LogRocket, you can understand the scope of the issues affecting your product and prioritize the changes that need to be made. LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done.

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