Stop Chasing “Delight”: What Really Drives Customer Experience

Ask 100 people what makes a great customer experience and you’ll hear the usual answers.

Responsiveness will be near the top. Fast replies, quick delivery, no friction. We live in a time-starved world—waiting is no longer acceptable.

Then there’s the product. It has to be genuinely good—innovative, well-designed, high quality. The kind of thing customers talk about.

Some will mention surprise. Memorable experiences tend to be different—and different, done well, sticks.

Others will talk about being heard. Customers value suppliers who listen, respond, and understand. Respect matters. Expertise matters. Confidence matters.

It’s a familiar checklist. And yes, ticking those boxes creates a solid experience. But it still misses something deeper.

The Myth of the “Silver Bullet”

Few people have challenged conventional thinking on customer experience more than Colin Shaw, founder of Beyond Philosophy and author of Building Great Customer Experiences.

After starting his career at Mars and BT, Shaw moved through sales, training, and marketing before focusing on customer experience. That journey gave him a unique perspective: every function sees—and treats—the customer differently.

At BT, he recalls a customer who had 27 separate visits, each from someone saying, “I’m from British Telecom.” Different teams. Different agendas. All competing for attention.

Individually, each interaction may have been fine.

Collectively? A terrible experience.

That’s the problem with checklists. They optimise moments—but ignore the whole.

Why B2C Gets It (and B2B Often Doesn’t)

Consumer brands—think global operators like McDonald's—have built repeatable customer experience models. They design them, train them, and deliver them consistently at scale.

B2B organisations often struggle.

Silos dominate. Production, finance, sales, marketing—each with its own priorities.

• Production won’t shift schedules

• Finance won’t flex terms

• Sales carries the customer burden without authority

The result? Inconsistency.

And inconsistency kills experience.

The Dangerous Search for “Delight”

Shaw also highlights a common trap: the obsession with delight.

Of course companies want to delight customers. But here’s the reality:

Delight doesn’t scale.

Do it once—it’s memorable. Do it repeatedly—it becomes expected.

At that point, it’s no longer delight. It’s the baseline.

Worse still, many organisations go looking for a shortcut—a piece of software, a transformation programme, a “solution.”

But there is no single fix.

And when the investment is made, the inevitable question follows: “Where’s the ROI?”

Customer Experience Is Emotional (Even in B2B)

One of the biggest misconceptions—especially in B2B—is that decisions are purely rational.

They’re not.

Relationships drive B2B. And relationships are built on emotions.

Customer experience operates across three layers:

• Rational

• Emotional

• Psychological

Ignore any one of these, and you weaken the experience.

Take a simple example: a bank pen chained to a desk. Functionally harmless. But subconsciously. it signals distrust.

That’s behavioural science in action. And it’s everywhere.

What Actually Drives Value?

If there’s one place to start, it’s here: what does the customer truly value?

Without that clarity, companies fall into the trap of implementing solutions before understanding the problem.

Shaw’s concept of emotional DNA is useful here. Every experience is made up of multiple emotional components—trust, reassurance, confidence, frustration, anxiety.

The mix is unique to each organisation.

And crucially, it can be measured.

Memory Is the Real Battleground

Customer experience doesn’t live in the moment.

It lives in memory.

Customers remember how an experience felt—especially the ending.

A great meal can be ruined by a bad coffee.A strong project can be undone by a poor final interaction.

What sticks is not the average of the experience—but the emotional high points and the ending.

That’s why leading organisations are starting to think in terms of memory mapping—understanding which moments matter, and which emotions endure.

From Checklist to Culture

This brings us back to the core issue.

Great customer experience isn’t built on a checklist.

It’s built on culture.

It has to run through the organisation—across every function, every decision, every interaction.

Leadership sets the tone. Hiring reinforces it. Behaviour sustains it.

When it works:

• Silos break down

• Decisions align around the customer

• Consistency improves

• Experience becomes intentional, not accidental

The Formula That Actually Works

In the end, it comes down to this:

Structure + Culture = Great Customer Experience

You need systems, processes, and design.

But without the right mindset, they won’t deliver.

A Final Thought

As Jan Carlzon famously said:

“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.”

And perhaps the modern extension of that idea is this:

Customers may forget what you said. They may forget what you did.

But they won’t forget how you made them feel.