How to Design Delightful Customer Experiences

AI is making it easier than ever to deliver a 5-star experience. It's time to aim a little higher.

One of my favourite ways to come up with incredible customer experiences is to run the 11-star exercise.

Created by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, the exercise works on product, marketing, sales challenges to find new ways to delight customers.

You can even apply it to HR and finance processes to delight your teammates.

It works best as a team exercise.

Here is how it works.

Step 1: Get honest about 5-star reviews.

You might think a 5-star review means something is amazing. But actually it just means it wasn't bad.

Think about it. When you give a 4-star review on Airbnb, Uber, or Google Reviews, it often means you weren't satisfied with something.

5 stars just means everything you expect to happen happened.

But what about things you didn't expect to happen?

Step 2: Come up with 6 to 11-star experiences.

A 6-star experience goes above and beyond what's expected. That's where delight lives.

It requires you to understand the customer's deepest dreams and desires to make them feel something.

Jon McNeill, the ex-president of Tesla, coined a phrase that became the bedrock of Tesla's sales training and sums this up well:

"Make them talk about you at dinner."

Once you come up with a 6-star experience, keep going. Come up with a 7-star, 8-star, all the way up to 11 stars.

Step 3: Go back and implement your 6-7 star ideas.

By the time you've created an 11 star experience, you'll have something crazy.

Chesky described an 11-star check-in as arriving at the airport and being greeted by Elon Musk who offers to take you into space.

The act of going beyond what's possible is an important part of this exercise. Suddenly, when you review your 6 and 7-star ideas, they actually seem pretty achievable in comparison.

And because your team imagined the 11-star with you, they're far more open to the 6 and 7-star ideas than they would have been before.

The Exercise Behind the Exercise

After running this exercise a few times with different companies, I noticed the unique ideas people come up with reveal what they truly care about.

As a founder, the areas you end up exaggerating give you a glimpse into the ideal you're actually striving for.

For example, Chesky's 11-star experience involving a trip with Elon Musk into space reveals his value of adventure and connection.

When you can incorporate these higher ideals and beliefs in your marketing copy it can be very powerful.

As it becomes harder and harder to stand out, delivering a 7-star experience that gets customers talking about you at dinner is exactly what you need.

Related Reading:

• What Thinking Big Actually Means
• How to Under-complicate Your Product (and Save Money)
• How to Build a Strong Brand for Your Startup

Originally published on July 9th, 2026