Our Latest Experiment: Delight Labs

Smiling is contagious. It’s scientifically proven. When we see someone smile, our mirror neurons compel us to copy the behavior. Smiling is a universal language and sharing one makes us human.

These days, it’s often harder to pass on a smile directly. In a world obsessed with speed, scale, and automation, it seems radical and almost risky for an online business to want to evoke a smile from its customers. Those of us who aim to delight our customers must constantly experiment if we want to adopt the latest technology without sacrificing the quality of their experience.

At Help Scout, the relentless pursuit of delight motivates everything we do, from the products we build to the emails we write. We’ve spent nearly 15 years learning through trial and error and asking ourselves: how does one create customer delight?

Finally, the findings are conclusive: You can’t engineer customer delight.

We wanted to share this conclusion with the world — and have some fun doing it. So we worked with our friends at Fuzzco to craft a story that captures our never-ending journey to unearth where delight comes from. Is it developed in a lab? Does it have a scientific formula?

After many years of rigorous testing (by a fictional research arm of Help Scout we’ve affectionately dubbed “Delight Labs”), our software emerged as the only customer support platform scientifically proven to amplify delight.

This quest led to many failed experiments along the way. As it turns out, customer delight is more of an art than a science.

Winged orcas aside, we hope this campaign inspires you to be more intentional (and excited!) about delighting your customers. After all, customer delight is one of the most powerful forces in business. It’s not quaint. It’s not romantic. It’s a competitive advantage. Delightful support can turn everyday interactions into long-term loyalty and fuel your word-of-mouth engine.

If you live in the Boston area, you might catch our billboard near Fenway Park and digital street signage around town. If you do, be sure to snap a photo and tag us. Otherwise, look out for the campaign in a social feed near you.

I hope it makes you smile.