When the Kano Model was all the rage, the UX team I was on at the time talked a lot about analyzing the products and processes and products we were working on in terms of whether existing elements were dissatisfiers, satisficers, or delighters. The gist was that you wanted to lower the number of things that piss your users off (duh), keep the things that they considered table stakes, and start delivering things that delighted the users and made them want to come back.
Thirty one days ago I took my husband to the hospital for abdominal pain; thirty one days later he’s still in the hospital, being evaluated for a liver transplant due to CF liver disease, and neither one of us has seen our three dogs for more than 18 hours since.
Our dogs are boarded at our local Petsmart, in the Pet Hotel. They’ve been going to this location since they were puppies. They know the staff. They know the routine. They get great care there. Even if the doggie equivalent of Disney World was around the block from our Petsmart and half the price, I’d probably still be bringing my “kids” to this location.
That’s a little bit more than table stakes — most places can’t say that they’re able to keep staff for as long as our location. In many ways they’re like family.
But also, we’ve known the staff at this store now for 16 years, so in some real ways the low turnover and high care my dogs get is my expectation — just as the Kano Model predicts, our delighters eventually become our satisficers because they’re the every day.
So when I dropped the furballs off almost a month ago and the staff offered me the photo packages, I was like yeah, you know what? some pictures of the dogs might be nice.
And now, every day, I get 1-3 pictures of each dog playing during activity camp, and 1-3 pictures of the dogs at “bedtime”, reading a book on a comfy blanket.
It’s not a delighter exactly. It’s a “keeping me alive” level of rebalancing. There will be an end to this journey one way or another. We will get through it. I will see and hug and love my dogs again.
I don’t know what the photo feature is costing Petsmart. I don’t know how difficult it is to implement. I do know that it’s raised my “brand loyalty” on this location even higher than it was before, and that’s saying something.
So thank you, Petsmart, and for the rest of you, here are my three delighters this evening playing during activity time. They may not delight you as much as they delight me, but that’s ok. Sometimes a feature is only meant for the person it serves.
