Magical experiences

The other day I bought my mother some flowers for Mother’s Day. I called up a florist and told them the arrangement I wanted, and they asked me a few basic questions: my name, address, and phone number, along with my mother’s name and number, and the message on the card. I paid and was about to hang up when something hit me. What were they going to do with my mother’s number?

“We usually call and ask for directions,” they said.

I shuddered. Instead of being surprised at the door with a gift, my mother would have received a phone call from some stranger wanting to know whether it was the left turn by the tire shop or the one before that. That stranger may have got lost and called back. They’d have called again to say they were outside. By then, the wonderful, surprising experience of getting flowers would have felt much less wonderful and surprising. It would have lost its magic. I gave them directions to the house and told them to delete her number from their system.

Calling someone for directions seems like a small thing. But creating experiences that feel magical is about keeping someone inside a bubble you’ve created, from beginning to end. Little things that seem insignificant can pop the bubble.

It’s like when you’re watching a movie or reading a book. The best actors inhabit their characters so completely, and the best writers set scenes and draw human interactions so skillfully, that you forget the whole thing isn’t actually happening. You become a spectator to fictional events that feel real, no matter how improbable.

That is, until an American actor tries on a Jamaican accent and it falls flat. Or until some sentence has a comma in the wrong place and you have to go over it again. And just like that, the veneer is lifted and you’re back on your couch.

Interacting with a product or service is a little like that. When it’s well designed, everything feels so natural that before you know it, you’ve achieved what you set out to. You don’t even notice the steps you’re taking, the buttons you’re pushing, or the decisions you’re making. It pulls you along like a good story.

I run a food delivery company, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what wonderful customer experiences look like in my line of business. I’ve realized that the decisions that create magic aren’t always straightforward.

What does magic look like when you’re delivering food?

Let’s take a simple example. Say a customer places an order for a burger and a Sprite, but the restaurant says it’s out of Sprite. You call back the customer and they say a Coke is fine. Then you go to collect the food and the restaurant tells you they just sold the last Coke by mistake. Do you call the customer again and ask them to pick something else?

The compromise here is between two components of a magical experience: Getting exactly what you want, and getting it with as little trouble as possible. Both aren’t always possible. If the first is more important to the customer, you should call them again. If the second is, you shouldn’t.

You have to make a judgment call that involves several considerations. Has this customer been fussy about drinks before? Have they ever ordered anything other than Coke or Sprite? How hard would it be to just buy a drink from another restaurant? More philosophically, how important is the drink to the enjoyment of a meal, for most people?

These are the sorts of things that will go through your mind, about a $3 drink, if you’re interested in providing a magical experience.

Here’s another example. Suppose a customer orders meals from two different restaurants. Should one driver collect both and deliver them at the same time, or should each be handled separately? In the first case, the food will arrive more slowly, but the customer only has put on their bathrobe, walk downstairs and exchange niceties with a delivery person once. In the second, each meal arrives more quickly, but at the expense of more work for the customer. It’s not always clear which is better.

But I suppose the point isn’t to always know. The point is to care about knowing. Magic is hard to create, and we don’t always get it right at Hopscotch. But we spend a lot of time focusing on every little thing— every pixel, every button, every line of copy — trying to come close.