enhance the first-class customer experience by engaging all five senses with delicious food, signature perfumes, aesthetically pleasing cabins, relaxing music, and comfortable furnishings. Innovative and novel products or features can also lead to delight—such as an insurer that disrupted the industry when it paid out a claim within seconds. Personalized tokens of appreciation can help companies stand out from the competition, specifically for customers with high expectations. From our research in insurance, customer verbatims revealed drivers of delight—for instance, one customer told us, “The representative came to our appointment with flowers for me and a bottle of wine for my husband as a thank you for our years of loyalty.” It is important to note, however, that gifting done at scale can add significant cost to a company, which is why driving delight has typically been regarded as expensive and unsustainable by some companies. Yet, as seen through our research, when done selectively with high-value customers to maximize personalized customer value, it can be powerful. And, a simple upgrade to an existing product may not be joyful for most people but may deliver exceptional joy to some—making it vital to understand each customer’s core emotional and functional needs and deliver against them to create a sense of ambassadorship. Three ways to stoke the delight engine To be able to constantly drive positive value from delight, companies need to establish a structured and sustainable delight engine—one with approaches that continually measure, design, and deliver delight at the right moment to the right person to generate positive returns. Through our research, we have identified three key levers that companies could use to create an effective delight engine. Measure delight and its value Companies first need to understand the moments of delight that resonate with various customer segments. Here, a mix of qualitative and quantitative research can help uncover what causes delight in a particular industry and along which customer journey. A robust delight measurement system that captures the intensity of joy and surprise across the customer journey can help qualify moments of delight. This further needs to be paired with incremental value measurement driven by delight across the journey, as well as the longevity of the incremental value received through various types of delight interventions. This method can ensure that investment is focused in areas with the highest return potential. In our research, we found that a single moment of delight at the correct time in the right customer journey can increase loyalty and intent to spend for up to six to nine months after the delight experience. By tracking the impact of delight interventions on key business outcomes such as loyalty, cross-sell, up-sell, and retention, companies can continually refine their delight interventions to create exceptional customer experiences and value. Match design to experience Designing unforgettable experiences isn’t solely a creative endeavor—it requires a design methodology that focuses on optimizing surprise and joy. Designing emotion-provoking moments for each target segment calls for a design methodology that has a deep understanding of customer emotions and triggers, followed by the curation, testing, and refinement of delight interventions that induce those emotions. These interventions can be significant, such as differentiating product features, or be micro-interventions such as a handwritten apology or appreciation note. The design of delightful customer experiences could be embedded in a company’s capability building and culture change initiatives. As those 7 Fueling growth through moments of customer delight