Bringing joy to your company. Having an Amazng Turn Around and New Shift

Bringing joy to your company.
The examples above should give you some inspiration, but just in case you still aren’t sure how to bring joy to your company, brainstorm different ideas according to the following forms that joy creation can take:

1. Encouraging purchases or trials. What can you do during these preliminary phases that would delight prospective customers and make them more likely to convert?

2. Onboarding. Once you’ve got prospects on board, how can you introduce them to your company’s personality in a way that’s fun and unique? For example, the team at When I Work makes customers feel welcome by sending each one of them handwritten thank you letters as soon as they sign up to become a paying customer. It's a small gesture that makes a big and lasting impact when it comes to building loyalty, getting repeat business and landing new customers.

3. Delivering awesome customer service. People rarely want to deal with customer service teams, but your actions can change their perceptions by making a dreaded experience something to write home about.

4. Developing customer loyalty. Have you heard the story about how Zappos paid for all the tolls on a particular section of Massachusetts roads from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving 2011? The company did it to make travel less stressful during the holidays, but imagine what it did for the brand’s customer loyalty?

5. Communicating with customers. Every experience you have with a customer is an opportunity to bring delight and joy. Consider carefully how your actions and the language you choose reflects on your brand.

6. Constructing your brand identity. Similarly, think carefully about what you want your brand to stand for. You don’t need to force whimsy, but you should make delighting customers a foundational component of your brand.

7. Building your app. Would your customers appreciate receiving a badge for completing in-app activities? Maybe they’d be delighted by prompts that congratulate them on making progress learning your tool? App development tools such as Shepherd and Hopscotch make it possible.

8. During the holidays. Too many of us associate the holidays with families, travel and stress -- so why not do something nice for your customers during these trying times? Surprise and delight them with a special message, an occasion-specific discount or some other fun perk.

9. Recovering from a bad experience. Bad experiences happen in business, but they don’t have to mean the loss of a customer. Make delight a part of your customer retention efforts by making a good faith effort to resolve the issue and providing the customer with something special in exchange for giving you another chance.

Spend some time brainstorming these different options with your team to figure out what specific touch points would benefit most from this fairy dust, based on the nature of your product or service.

Then, make a plan for how you’ll execute your new delight-building plan. Will you ask loyal users for their feedback on your different ideas first, or will you take the leap and roll out your vision right away? What teams need to be consulted with to execute your new plan? How will you evaluate the success of your mission to make future initiatives even more delightful for your user base?

One final word of caution -- use this brainstorming period to carefully think through whether your proposed delight-building exercises will affect usability, or whether there are any potential snags your ideas could hit. Facebook’s “Year in Review” app seemed like a win-win for all parties, until the algorithms underpinning it unexpectedly highlighted users’ personal tragedies in some cases.

Certainly, this is an extreme example, but it should emphasize the importance of caution when it comes to planning and executing joy creation campaigns. Consider your options carefully, and then roll with the plan that’ll bring your company’s unique users the most delight possible.

Is delight a priority for your company? If so, leave a comment on how you use joy to connect with customers below: