Rule No. 3: Endear Your Customers

This is much harder than you think…

Everyone talks about “delighting” customers for a reason. Creating moments of delight is so rarely done in products (physical or digital) that it’s still surprising to people. Endearing customers to your product is difficult because it requires a change to your mindset. It requires that you become like a little child.

Joie de Vivre

I want to be perfectly clear that this is my natural state. I’m a total child. I’ve had to learn to love being responsible in my life. But my fallback is always play. If you look at my office, you’ll see evidence of it everywhere. I mean, I regularly spend my hard-earned money on ridiculous things like this:

So how does this manifest in my work? Let me illustrate with an example.

Don’t Not Be Silly

A few years ago, in my work with Kuali, I had the joy of redesigning an enterprise app that enables the following: “Build custom forms and workflows using automation platform designed specifically for higher education institutions.” I actually snored a little bit as I wrote that. I love naps.

In this product, people create “apps” that are basically forms. Each app has an icon and a color to help distinguish it on a dashboard. When the user is done editing their form, they close the app and return to a dashboard. As the app closes, there was a little bit of a lag as various things get provisioned and un-provisioned. Now, performance is always improving but sometimes you can’t always get around it. I decided we needed to make that lag a little more fun.

So I came up with a list of cute sign-off phrases and worked with the developer to make a transition page that randomizes the sign-off with the app icon and color like this:

Some of the sign-off phrases include: Adios, See ya, Buh-bye, Arrivederci, Toodles, thxbai, etc. It’s such a small thing and yet the result is profound.

Customers absolutely love this. We regularly get feedback like this:

We were with the customer today. We’re building their free app with them today. Its a compensation authorization form for contract/grant activities. They love the icons and colors and the little “Kthxbai” message when you exit the app. The word “Cute” was used a lot. Someone commented that our app is more like Google than a typical enterprise app. The IT person who has spent a bit of time with DocuSign and other workflow engines, said we’re the friendliest, simplest workflow platform she’s seen.

And this:

In the customer cohort meeting. We just got a shout out for the goodbye messages when you exit an app and everyone nodded!

This feature has been in the product for years now and I’m constantly amazed by how much people talk about it. Since adding this, the product has a dozen more moments just like this that bring a ray of sunshine in everyone’s work day.

Totes Adorbs

I think the reason this stuff doesn’t happen as much as it should is because too many teams create a culture that is overly serious. If regularly creating delight requires childlike play, then your culture needs to support that kind of play. One big reason that this happens regularly at Kuali is that the CEO is a big kid as well. He loves being silly and encourages that mindset in his company. And it rolls downhill into the team culture.

Figure out how to change your mindset. Stop being so serious about everything. Only a few things need to be dead serious. Everything else needs to be play. Your employees will feel it and your customers will too.