Visual memories

Just imagine if your customers walked away with a visual memory board like the one captured by Thomas Hawk...

The idea of every detail being part of a magical gathering is Disney's greatest strength. And it is a real possibility for companies choosing to take action on designing their customers experience.

If you had any question about what an experience does, or how we as humans store it, I think this post will help you great a visual reference...

Ideas from the most uncommon place

Another great postby Eric Myers at ICE.

OK something really scary - I had the same thoughts the other day about those damn motion-activated dispensers in public restrooms. The bathroom I visited also had motion-activated sinks, paper towel and soap dispensers...

My question. Why doesn't someone install a motion activated door? Every think about what you touch after you use the other touch-less dispensers...? Maybe there is truth to what you don't know can't hurt you!

A.G. Lafley gets experience

"We have to create a great experience every time you touch the brand, and the design is a really big part of creating the experience and the emotion. We try to make [a customer's experience] better, but better in her terms. If you stay focused on experiences, I think you will have a lower risk of designing something that may measure well in a lab but may not do well with the consumer."

A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble (in case you didn't know)

Very well said - we have always believed the life of a brand is the customers experience. And, we have always believed that good design is at the core of a good experience....

Take from an article in the June Design issue of FAST Company.

Radio Shack embraces the customers experience

After nearly a decade of dingy stores, Radio Shack has spent a lot of time and money upgrading their store layouts and locations. Now they are hot on the customer experience trail with their new StoreOne
CEO and President David Edmondson, who officially took on the CEO title at the company's shareholder meeting on May 19th, is evidently the driving force behind this initiative.

Story here.

At the end of the day

While watching a movie with my daughter (yes, the Disney movie Little Mermaid 2), I heard a character say something that stuck with me.

"Ariel, those aren't just treasures, they're memories..."

So, I started thinking about what do customers have at the end of the day - besides the physical stuff they bought, or the results of a service they purchased. They are left with a memory of the experience. Now if that isn't a cold cup of water in your face, I don't know what is.

Just think that this memory is actually independent of the actual product or service. And that this memory is brought from the subconscious to the concisions every time the customer uses the product, and every time they share the product or service with a friend...

Memories are powerful. Imagine if you designed the memory first, and then designed the product and service. How different would the world of the customer be?

Robert Nardelli - Experience matters

How important is your customer's experience? Well, Mr. Nardelli (Chief Executive Officer of Home Depot) clearly sees this as a key way of distinguishing Home Depot from the rest of the competitive landscape. He has listed The Experience Economy as his most influential book at FastTalk:: Books that Matter.

While many will argue whether or not Home Depot is successful at creating a unique and memorable experience, including Seth Godin, the idea that they have begun to pay attention to it is what is important at this point in time. What Mr. Nardelli has done is validate the belief that customer experience design is about more than a fad - its about the economy... And that if the number one do-it-yourself retail chain is focusing on it, then it has reached a level that no business can ignore.

Thanks to Jeff Kalley at Experience Economy Evangelist for bringing this to my attention.




http://experiences.typepad.com/experience_economy/2005/04/home_depots_chi.html

The brand is the experience

"Your brand is created out of customer contact and the experience your customers have of you" - so begins the article at Marketing Web. Thanks to Karl Long who brought this to my attention through his post at Customer Experience Strategy.

This article captures some key elements for understanding customer experience design. The first thing it outlines is the difference between advertising and branding. It also brilliantly sets the stage for what really counts - once you strip away the old way of thinking, you arrive at the customer experience. This is the place where a firm directly interfaces with its chosen customer - and the source of all revenue (and if you do it right, some profit).

This article refers to three driving forces:

1. The Customer’s frame of reference – This is the sum total of the customer’s background and perceptions and needs, created by experience, environmental and competitive activity.
* We like to think of this as the customers expectation - what they are thinking and anticipating when before they interact with your product or service.

2. The Customer’s expectations – The sum total of the customer’s frame of reference and your marketing communication.
* Instead we look at the second important step when interacting with a product or service - the actual experience itself (completely from the customer's perspective)


3. The Customer’s actual experience – the sum total of the organization’s strategy, customer value proposition the design of the experience and the actual delivery of the “designed” customer experience.
* We follow up by looking at their memory of their interaction - this is the place where the experience is boiled down and stored...

Another article at Marketing Web discusses the demise of brand loyalty. While this might be a bit too extreme, it does touch on a point we see often - loyalty chasers. Loyalty chasers are those who believe that if they can simply track loyalty, they will be taken to another level. What they often fail to understand or acknowledge is that loyalty is an outcome of the customer's experience. Loyalty is earned, and epxeriences are designed and stagged...

Its coming...

After too many months of agonizing what to talk about we finally recorded our inaugural podcast. We have an interview with the founder and president of a really great local company who is fully immersed in creating a remarkable experience for his clients.

We will post The Experience Journal Podcast here at the blog along with show notes. In addition, we will provide a URL for RSS feeds.

It is our desire to release a new podcast every 6 weeks... We also hope that our wandering through the experience landscape inspires and moves you to take action - what action? Any kind of action - just do something...

A couple lessons learned we wanted to share right away:

1. Notify the recording engineer of the exact specs in advance :)
2. Relax BEFORE the recording gets started
3. Don't sit on Trev's counter (our recording engineer)
4. Don't wear polyester warm-up pants
5. Avoid wheels on chairs
6. Keep things to an outline, and just have fun...

New policies, new experience

The United States Postal Service has begun a new campaign here in the Minneapolis market that got me thinking about the effect of transferring responsibility in experience transactions.

In their infinite wisdom, they have decided that it is safer for their carriers to deliver the mail to the curbside and cluster-boxes (large groups of mail boxes that have locked access). They have gone as far as saying that curbside delivery would occur even if no mailbox existed.

I am not sure if they have checked with the local cities to determine what residential codes that dictate the placement, or even existence of, mailboxes in neighborhoods. Probably not...

An interesting strategy - convenience for the employees... I have yet to see this type of strategy be successful in private business. Especially at the same time when rates have increased over the last several years.

Have you ever been tempted to say "that is our customer's responsibility" or "we need to make that our customer's responsibility" ? I often wonder why we limit our thinking to such a black and white solution approach. It is one of those frustrating arenas that we all fall into - yes, even an experience designer...!

I am not sure I have an answer for our friends at the post office, but I think that if they looked at the new experience they were creating from the outside-in, they may find themselves embarrassed by their proposition - especially curbside mail without a mailbox! So, whenever you are tempted to make your customers accountable for something take an outside-in look at your creation...

If anyone willing to post a winning idea, I will promise to propose it to the highest local level authority.