Customer Delight in the Most Unlikely Place
A Fax Story
One of the most common questions I receive is whether delight can be applied to any product, even those that aren’t traditionally consumer-facing. My answer is always the same: if a product is used by a human, their emotions must be respected and honored. When talking about emotion, I don’t draw a line between B2B and B2C because, in the end, we’re all building for humans. That’s why I advocate for a B2H (Business to Human) approach.
I like this quote “People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.” It means people are willing to pay for products that make them feel valued and help them become who they aspire to be. Whether it’s feeling smarter, more confident, more organized, or more connected, great products tap into those emotional and identity-driven motivations. Even in B2B, users choose tools that help them perform better, look competent, or feel in control. When you build with that in mind, you’re not just selling a product; you’re enabling transformation.
Delight in Fax product
Let’s be honest, when you think of delight in product design, fax software probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.
But that’s exactly the world Bernhard Hecker was working in. When I met him recently in Munich, he shared a story with me about how he brought genuine human connection and emotional resonance into one of the most boring and overlooked corners of tech.
Bernhard was the Chief Product Officer at Europe’s largest cloud fax company for nearly two decades. One of their flagship products was a massive platform that allowed companies to connect a wide range of systems—SAP, email, APIs, and more—to send and receive faxes at scale across the globe. It’s not exactly the stuff of viral feature launches or design awards.
The twist? Fax is still in heavy use in some industries, especially in insurance, healthcare, and even food delivery, because of legal, security, or reliability requirements. But here’s the kicker: the people using the system day-to-day weren’t the ones sending the faxes. The only user group the product team could talk to? Admins.
And here’s the constraint that makes the story even more unusual: There was no end-user interface. Just an admin portal: minimal, functional, and deeply technical. That was the only place where they could even try to make a difference.
And these admins were in a tough spot. They were rarely appreciated, not the stars of their companies, and certainly not the people proudly talking about their work at dinner parties. Their job was to make the system work quietly, efficiently and invisibly.
But Bernhard and his team saw something others didn’t: an opportunity to delight.
They decided to bet on the admin.
They asked these questions:
Who are these people?
What matters to them?
What makes them feel seen, respected, and empowered?
And they acted on it.
They shared everything (except confidential info).
They taught them how the system worked from the inside.
They spoke to them like humans, not just “system operators.”
They recognized their expertise.
They even shared technical details that didn’t offer immediate value, but built trust and gave admins a rare sense of understanding how things worked under the hood.
And something powerful happened. These admins, once overlooked and underappreciated, began to take pride in their work. They became experts, advocates, and loyal users. And when they moved to other companies, they brought the platform with them.
It wasn’t a flashy strategy. It didn’t rely on end-user feedback or UI magic. It was a quiet revolution of respect and emotional connection.
And that’s when Bernhard shared the mantra he’s carried with him for more than 15 years:
In every single release, we include at least one feature tagged ‘customer delight.
Delight, he told me, doesn’t always mean something big or showy.
It means including something: anything that makes a user smile or feel excited.
Even if that user is a fax admin.
Even if no one else ever sees it.
That, to me, is the essence of great product thinking. Not chasing headlines. But creating small, intentional moments of joy, even in the most unexpected places.