Delight isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s good for business (here’s why)

The water bottle moment that changed how I think about delight.

Wait, don’t go anywhere! Hear me out. Water bottles.

During HeyOrca's recent Delight hackathon, we invited Haley Wells from seo+ and Taylor Glymph from Ignite Social Media to talk about what delight really means for marketing teams. 

Taylor casually held up her favourite water bottle mid-conversation and within seconds, others on the call were scrambling off-screen and coming back with the exact same brand. Suddenly, everyone was laughing, comparing colours, debating favourite features. A totally unplanned, completely silly little moment that turned into connection.

But that’s only half of the picture.

Delight isn't just emotional. It isn't just functional either. It lives where the two intersect, and once you start designing for both, something really cool happens. In your product, in your community, in how people show up for each other every day.

That's what I want to share with you here: having delight as a mindset isn’t just the best approach – it’s good for business. 

What delight really is (and what it isn’t)

Delight lives at the intersection of function and emotion.

We invited Dr. Nesrine Changuel to speak with the Pod and share her research on product delight. 

Her insights were thoughtful and grounded in both research and real experience, building products people genuinely love. 

One of her examples was about Spotify Wrapped. This beloved feature brings joy to their users as well as a fun element of surprise about what their results will say. While also providing users the ability to share their recap with other music lovers, which creates a sense of belonging. 

After reading her book Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection and listening to her keynote, Nesrine helped me connect the dots between what I had learned in hospitality and how delight shows up in products and teams today.

It really was an amazing and insightful experience that left me with three main takeaways. 

1.  Deep delight is created when you solve for both functional and emotional needs. 
2.  The feelings of joy and surprise are deeply rooted in experiencing delight, which honestly makes sense! 
3. To create the most delightful experience, the secret sauce is to anticipate needs and exceed expectations.

Anticipating needs and exceeding expectations is something deeply rooted in hospitality. It’s the quiet noticing. The extra care. The moments that say, we thought about you before you ever had to ask.

What clicked for me is that delight isn’t just about how something feels, and it isn’t just about how well something works. It’s the combination of both.

Why delight matters at HeyOrca

At HeyOrca, we believe community is the future of marketing. 

And to build engaging communities that are deeply rooted in belonging, you need more than strategy or tools. You need a human touch.

There is nothing more human than emotions. Understanding delight helps us uncover what truly matters to our community. It allows us to build experiences that don’t just work well, but make people feel heard, seen, and like they belong in the space they’re helping to shape.

That’s what we’re doing atHeyOrca. We give teams the tools to understand their needs as marketing professionals, plan how they show up, and connect with people who genuinely align with their brand. 

Delight plays a key role in that. 

When people enjoy using a product, when it feels like it was made for them personally, they become a loyal and active member of your community. 

How we practice delight at HeyOrca (and how you can too)

Let me tell you how delight shows up across the Pod and what we do every day. 

How we delight our customers

Building community isn't just what we help our customers do; it's how we show up for them, too. And we take that pretty seriously! 

From the moment someone joins HeyOrca, we know learning new software can come with challenges. That’s why our onboarding calls feel more like a meet and greet than a traditional demo. Before jumping into features, we take time to understand the person behind the screen, their goals, their workflow, and how we can make their day easier.

We also know time matters. When someone reaches out for help, they shouldn’t worry about long wait times or talking to a bot. Our human Customer Care team holds themselves to an average response time of three minutes.

Another way we delight our community is through our daily newsletter, The HeyOrca Brief. It provides our over 35,000 delighted subscribers with quick, easy-to-digest updates on social trends, tips, and insights that help them stay informed without adding more noise to their day. With an average open rate of 60%, we are so excited to continue to be that resource for our community! (For context, the industry standard hovers around 20%, so we are pretty proud of that).

In our eyes, providing a functional product is important – we find the most delight in being that go-to place for our community to find what they need to thrive!

How we delight through our product

I've learned very quickly that managing social calendars and content creation can be like organizing beautiful chaos. It comes with navigating a constant mix of emotions, deadlines, and moving pieces. We aim to build a product that makes that day a little easier, with experiences that are as enjoyable as they are useful.

At HeyOrca, we really lean on our customers to learn as much as we can about their needs, workflows and challenges. This helps us anticipate needs before the customer even asks. 

A great example of this is the confirmation modal before publishing a post. Having to manage multiple workspaces and platforms is stressful enough; it makes a big difference when you know the product you are using has your back!

This job is not a one-person show (even though it may feel like that at times). 

Social Media Managers and Marketing teams rely on collaboration from their clients and other team members to be successful (and have more fun). 

When organizing all the different themes, clients or platforms, it helps to use our colour-code posts and events. It’s an easy way to have control over your work, add a bit of personality and keep organized without having to think too much. 

Looking to find a quick and easy way of giving feedback? Look no further than our emoji-reaction! A quick thumbs up can make an approval process seamless. 

Our Real-Time Presence feature allows you to see when collaborators are online, and can make you feel more connected.

That's what we're really building: a tool that understands our customers are real humans with real needs and emotions. That beautiful chaos deserves a product that actually has your back! 

How we delight one another

We can’t expect our orcas to create delight for others if they don’t experience it within the Pod themselves.

Going above and beyond our roles isn’t the exception here; it’s part of how we operate. In fact, we have a principle dedicated to it. We believe our wins and our failures are shared. Celebrations are collective. Lessons learned are meant to be talked about. And the moments that matter deserve to be prioritized.

Delight doesn’t belong to one person or one team. It’s created in everyday moments that allow us to share more about ourselves, learn about one another, and build real trust. Creating a space to be your true self. Maybe even a little weird. There is magic in knowing someone has your back and feeling safe to try, to fail, and to grow.

We were recently put to the test with a recent product change that would have a big impact on a group of customers and came with a whole lot of moving pieces. 

What I saw was every part of the Pod showing up! Trusting each other, keeping our community's needs front and centre, and navigating something hard with real grace. That's what a delighted team looks like under pressure.

When delight is felt within the Pod, it doesn’t stay there. It extends into the product, into our customer relationships, and into the communities we are so obsessed with.

Choosing delight

There is opportunity for delight in so many ways, whether you are building a product, meeting someone new or creating a new experience for a group of people. 

To truly keep delight as a mindset, it’s important to ask yourself: What are the main needs of your audience? How do you want them to feel, and is there an unexpected moment that could be added to make it even more memorable? It doesn’t need to be big and flashy, remember, we as humans want to be understood, seen and valued. 

I’ve even experienced this myself. 

Recently, I completed a big project at work, and my manager knows that I like to celebrate by visiting my favourite coffee shop. Without being asked – there was a gift card in my inbox while I was in the drive-thru on a Friday! 

I’ll never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I saw it, and it even led me to make my celebration that much sweeter as I was able to add a festive coffee mug to have with my celebratory coffee.

Delight isn’t just good for business.

It’s good for people.

And when your people are happy, your business is happy.