Ever been to Disney World? With most of our family living 50 miles away, we often felt like tour guides. Not a bad thing though. Lots any business can learn from Disney World customer experience design and operations. A real difference maker.
Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.
David Freemantle
Disney puts a tremendous amount of attention to its parks’ customer immersion and customer experience … in fact; one could say the Disney theme park mystique is 100% about immersing the customer in the culture of Disney movies and character history. Over 150,000 employees are employed ‘on stage’ each day at Disney parks to help create this customer experience immersion.
What are the ways Disney uses its park designs and ‘on–stage’ employees to create the best possible customer experience? Consider Disney’s explicit operations and design principles:
Care for Customers
In front of nearly every ride was stroller parking – and in Magic Kingdom, there were plenty of strollers because nearly every group had some small children. There were areas set aside for stroller parking, and clear instructions for where to park your stroller. Guess what? Customers still managed to ignore them. In most places, this might create chaos.
At Disney, they have a “stroller guy” whose entire job it was to pick up after lazy customers. We have seen them organize strollers into lines, put errant Sippy cups back into cup holders, and keep his little area of the park neat and organized. All customer-facing employees are responsible for ensuring parks remain clean, friendly, organized, and most of all, fun.
Immerse Customers in Brand
At Disney, you can’t look in any direction without seeing the Disney branding all around. In the park, it works to surround you with the Disney experience at every moment … even when some parts of the park are under construction. Not to mention the side benefit of Disney likely negotiating some discount on the construction work from businesses in exchange for allowing them to put their brand on the signage seen by millions of park customers.
Lots of help and directions
All-stage employees are encouraged to be “assertively friendly”. They are to seek out those who look like they need help before they come looking for help.
The parks at Disney are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for. As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another.
Disney does a great job keeping its signs easy to understand. They also have logical layouts for parks and plenty of places to pick up copies of maps as you’re walking around their parks.
Random acts of kindness
Each employee is encouraged to offer random acts of kindness often.
The Fast Pass system at Disney is a work of analytical art that is designed to keep people moving through attractions faster and in a more optimized way. To use it, you just insert your own park ticket and the Fast Pass will give you a specific time to return to a ride in order to board it without a wait. Only one is active at any one time, however. However, at several, you also got the unexpected surprise of a bonus ticket to a nearby (and usually less popular) ride.
Thanks to this bonus ticket, you had the chance to ride an extra ride at the same time and feel just a little better about your experience all day. A random act of kindness that costs nothing.
Be flexible with rules
Many of the rides take photos of you while you are on board. Those photos are sold to riders after the ride – a classic amusement park upselling technique. At Disney, they show you the images and put a person below those images just standing by to answer questions.
Of course, some people will just take a cell phone photo of their image instead of buying one. Many places would put up big signs preventing that. Disney, instead, puts a person there working under the photos to make it a little more socially awkward to take a photo of your photo … but they don’t outlaw it.
The result is that they probably still get a high percentage of people buying the photo who really want it, but they don’t need to have the typical rule outlawing the inevitable group of people who are happy with a lower-quality photo they take themselves.
Educating while entertaining
In many places in all the parks, Disney provides educational material on signs around the parks. This is particularly true in EPCOT and the Animal Kingdom … and special events like the annual garden show. Can’t be too much of this in our opinion.
Offer Reassurance
Everyone “on the stage” has a casting role, and as such, is responsible to contribute to the positive customer experience by being as helpful and assuring as possible.
When we traveled to Australia, we frequently ran into the expression a ‘nervous nelly’ used to represent a timid or always apprehensive person. We all know people like that. They check a map constantly even when they are going the right way, and usually find a reason to worry about something. Disney does a great job of making sure those people feel at ease, with plenty of places and people to answer questions.
Show Ready
Each customer-facing employee is expected to be “show ready” whenever they are on stage. Everyone has a part to play as a component of the show. On stage, the show is on … everyone follows costume and customer interface guidelines.
It is magic.
Breaks and relaxing are ONLY allowed in areas unavailable to guests.
Disney certainly knows all there is to know about customer immersion and customer experience, don’t they? It’s a culture handed down by Walt himself.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
What can your business apply from Disney operations that would improve your customer experience? Please share a story about your experience.
Remember, customers, create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving the success for yourself and your business? It is all about your people and their motivation, isn’t it? It is about creating a business where people want to work.
We are all very aware of the impact of a positive attitude on the performance of employees. Do you want to know or refresh the secrets to build and sustain a positive attitude?
Related: Creative Collaboration is the Solution for the Toughest Business Problems
You will perhaps have heard this very old story illustrating the difference between positive thinking and negative thinking:
Many years ago two salesmen were sent by a British shoe manufacturer to Africa to investigate and report back on market potential.
The first salesman reported back, “There is no potential here – nobody wears shoes.”
The second salesman reported back, “There is massive potential here – nobody wears shoes.”
This simple short story provides one of the best examples of how a single situation may be viewed in two quite different ways – negatively or positively.
We could explain this also in terms of seeing a situation’s problems and disadvantages, instead of its opportunities and benefits.
When telling this story its impact is increased by using exactly the same form of words (e.g., “nobody wears shoes”) in each salesman’s report. This emphasizes that two quite different interpretations are made of a single situation.
This is why doing the same type of project over and over or working on one thing for a very long period of time is likely to bore your programmers.
The best way to motivate your engineering team is making sure each one works on a variety of projects and, of course, allowing them to propose their own solutions to problems.
Extensive training
Every Zappos employee, regardless of department, goes through four weeks of onboard training across various departments, including the call center.
And because each Zappos employee is trained on the phones, the company does not need to bring in extra labor during peak holiday periods. Instead, all employees voluntarily take customer calls for 10 hours.
Provide consistent challenge
In the same vein, good programmers will welcome a challenge.
Engineers tend to “objectively measure themselves,” says Pinckney, so you should consistently move your employees up to harder and bigger projects.
People want to work … the offer
Tony Hsieh of Zappos wants all of his workers to be a good fit. So in the third week of training, each trainee gets “the offer” to leave (the offer varies from a few hundred to a thousand dollars).
If the employee does not feel Zappos is a good fit, he or she can take the money and leave, no hard feelings, no questions asked.
Don’t micro-manage
We advise managers to only plan for a few weeks in advance.
Trying to design a big system upfront is a fool’s game that requires programmers to be fortune tellers… and forcing them to be is going to make them discontent.
Let your hair down
For creative employees, Zappos encourages personal expression in many ways.
Workstations are marked with overhead license plates that carry the worker’s name and hire date. Employees decorate the conference rooms, and they take frustrations out on Bob, the mannequin punching bag.
Where’s the boss? Hsieh’s desk is on Monkey Row, covered in jungle vines.
Be flexible
Most importantly, understand that you should be flexible.
Imposing rigid deadlines, restricting creativity, and not understanding the needs of your employees are the worst things you could do if you wanted them to be happy and most productive.
Welcome input, encourage innovation, allow for the freedom to set priorities and timelines and let your employees have fun and be comfortable.
Coach
Life, play, and work should blend together. To help this along Zappos employs a full-time life coach to consult workers on business and personal issues.
Classes of 20 participate in goal-setting programs, and upon graduation, they write their achieved goals in a special hall of fame.
Look for subtle motivators
Employees really value working on something challenging that is actually useful, interesting, and going to make a difference.
Great employees take a lot of pride in their work and accomplishments that shine and make customers happy add considerable motivation. Everything else is a distant second.
People want to work … recognition
You must be flexible.
Zappos has a Desk of Epic Glory — need we say more?
In addition to this desk for outstanding employees, the company provides a throne for life coach graduates, and a monthly company parade to honor employee “Heroes.”
For those who prefer tangible recognition, there’s the Zollar Store, where employees redeem Zollars earned through goal achievement.
Many companies use similar types of recognition to show off the best of the best employees.
Use few goals and objectives as possible and allow employees to do what they believe is best for customers. Build a strong team and show trust wherever you can.
One of the few goals at Zappos call center is to answer 80 percent of calls within 20 seconds. After that, the clock is off.
The company trusts its employees to spend as much time as necessary to achieve the best outcome.
Call times and productivity are tracked, but there are no requirements, which can mean some long call times — the longest was 8.5 hours.
Promote good communication
Some employees can be rather introverted, which makes peer-to-peer communication more difficult.
They won’t always think to just go and talk to someone about something — instead, they’ll probably internalize everything more. Not something you want to encourage, obviously.
You can help by implementing ‘soft goals’ to promote further communication.
Delegate and empower
Every employee should be provided the tools and mentoring to help employee development.
At Zappos’ it is expected of employees to become a senior leader in five to seven years. But it is up to them to get there.
Workers are free to make career-defining customer decisions, even if that choice is to send free shoes or make personal greeting cards.
Continuous focus on culture
Culture is a big attraction, and businesses should work hard to foster it.
For example, at IBM consistent communications about company culture helped to instill certain beliefs within the employee population.
They often solicited ideas from across the business to continue cultural development.
At Zappos they have The Wishez Wall, to encourage employees to post wishes (a math tutor, a sewing table) and others fulfill them.
Each year, these activities are commemorated in an annual Culture Book.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for yourself and your team?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your continuous learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Ever been to Disney World? With most of our family living 50 miles away, we often felt like tour guides. Not a bad thing, though. Lots of any business can learn from Walt Disney customer experience design and operations. A real difference maker.
Disney puts a tremendous amount of attention to its parks’ customer immersion and customer experience … in fact; one could say the Disney theme park mystique is 100% about immersing the customer in the culture of Disney movies and character history.
Over 150,000 employees are employed ‘on stage’ each day at Disney parks to help create this customer experience immersion.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What customer experience design techniques work best for your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
What are the ways Disney uses its park designs and ‘on – stage’ employees to create the best possible customer experience? Consider Disney’s explicit operations and design principles:
In front of nearly every ride was stroller parking – and in the Magic Kingdom, there were plenty of strollers because nearly every group had some small children.
There were areas set aside for stroller parking, and clear instructions for where to park your stroller. Guess what? Customers still managed to ignore them. In most places, this might create chaos.
At Disney, they have a “stroller guy” whose entire job it was to pick up after lazy customers. We have seen them organize strollers into lines, put errant Sippy cups back into cup holders, and keep his little area of the park neat and organized.
All customer-facing employees are responsible for ensuring parks remain clean, friendly, organized, and most of all, fun.
Here is an interesting article about customer experience and the customer journey.
Disney World Customer Experience … a difference maker
At Disney, you can’t look in any direction without seeing the Disney branding all around. In the park, it works to surround you with the Disney experience at every moment … even when some parts of the park are under construction.
Not to mention the side benefit of Disney likely negotiating some discount on the construction work from businesses in exchange for allowing them to put their brand on the signage seen by millions of park customers.
All stage employees are encouraged to be “assertively friendly”. They are to seek out those who look like they need help before they come looking for help.
The parks at Disney are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for. As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another.
Disney does a great job keeping their signs easy to understand. They also have logical layouts for parks and plenty of places to pick up copies of maps as you’re walking around their parks.
Disney World Customer Experience … random acts of kindness
Each employee is encouraged to offer random acts of kindness often.
Related: Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
The Fast Pass system at Disney is a work of analytical art that is designed to keep people moving through attractions faster and in a more optimized way. To use it, you just insert your own park ticket and the Fast Pass will give you a specific time to return to a ride in order to board it without a wait.
Only one active at any one time, however. However, at several, you also got the unexpected surprise of a bonus ticket to a nearby (and usually less popular) ride.
Thanks to this bonus ticket, you had the chance to ride an extra ride at the same time and feel just a little better about your experience all day.
A random act of kindness that costs nothing.
Be flexible with rules
Many of the rides take photos of you while you are on board. Those photos are sold to riders after the ride – a classic amusement park upselling technique. At Disney, they show you the images and put a person below those images just standing by to answer questions.
Of course, some people will just take a cell phone photo of their image instead of buying one. Many places would put up big signs preventing that. Disney, instead, puts a person there working on the photos to make it a little more socially awkward to take a photo of your photo … but they don’t outlaw it.
The result is that they probably still get a high percentage of people buying the photo who really want it, but they don’t need to have the typical rule outlawing the inevitable group of people who are happy with a lower quality photo they take themselves.
One of my favorite experts in the field of customer experience is Andrew McFarland and Pivot Point Solutions. You’ll find lots of good examples and case studies to learn from in this blog.
Educating while entertaining
Many places in all the parks Disney provides educational material on signs around the parks. This is particularly true in EPCOT and the Animal Kingdom … and special events like the annual garden show. Can’t be too much of this in our opinion.
Remember to offer reassurance.
Offer reassurance
Everyone “on the stage” has a cast role, and as such, is responsible for contributing to the positive customer experience by being as helpful and assuring as possible.
When we traveled to Australia, we frequently ran into the expression of a ‘nervous nelly’ used to represent a timid or always apprehensive person. We all know people like that.
They check a map constantly even when they are going the right way, and usually find a reason to worry about something. Disney does a great job of making sure those people feel at ease, with plenty of places and people to answer questions.
Each customer-facing employee is expected to be “show ready” whenever they are on stage. Everyone has a part to play as a component of the show. On stage, the show is on … everyone follows costume and customer interface guidelines. Breaks and relaxing are ONLY allowed in areas unavailable to guests.
Disney certainly knows all there is to know about customer immersion and customer experience, don’t they? It’s a culture handed down by Walt himself.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
What can your business apply from Disney operations that would improve your customer experience? Please share a story about your experience.
Remember, the customer creates the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.
Like this story? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
Please share a story about a creative customer experience design strategy with this community.
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
10 Laws of Customer Experience Design
Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success
Is your goal to improve employee motivation and engagement? And do it in the way that makes them want to do it? A quality of a top notch leader isn’t it? Well remember this: good leaders are reliable and yet not predictable. And they should be consistent without being predictable. Not rocket science is it? But without these leadership traits, you will be losing the ability to motivate your team.
What skill matters most if you are a leader of a small business? Or perhaps for any business leader? We believe it is the ability to motivate and engage. For a small business, to develop the best motivational leader qualities is more critical to the daily operations than larger businesses. Why? Because there is much less leadership to be involved. And fewer employees so you need everyone fully engaged and motivated.
Can you change? Of course, you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?
Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set new speed records of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.
Your personality and attitude make a world of impact on those around you, don’t they? Making motivational improvements for you and your team should not be rocket science … it is usually the simple things that make you most effective.
So … you need to pay attention to the development of your own motivational leadership abilities if you are a leader of a small business. Here are some things that you need to do to motivate and engage your staff:
Improve employee motivation … providing challenging work
Wondering what the most important part of being social is? It is listening, hands down in our opinion. And listening means hearing. So if you don’t start with great listening, you will immediately turn off many of staff.
I learned this one quite early in my leadership and management career. Remember your first step in team motivation is making listening the backbone of your conversation. And then give everyone meaningful work tasks and cross train.
Storytelling in communications
Have you noticed how much employee motivation has changed in the last decade? Most people have. So when you use just traditional communication techniques, employees imagine you are stuck in time. Not a good thing.
One new communication technique we think is most important is storytelling. Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to communicate your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about.
Do you know your employees well and their likes and dislikes? If so, this in your guide to consistent personal conversational topics.
Always be consistent in the subjects you know your employees are interested in. Select the new variants but stick with their interests.
Show your personality
Everyone has a personality or at least 98% of the populace. Your business reflects the personalities of its leaders either by choice or by accident. You know which is best, don’t you?
Every successful leader has a specific tone of voice. One that relates to the personality of the business. And yes, of course, a business and its leadership have a distinctive personality. Decide what personality you want and let your tone reflect it in your leadership style … consistently. Employees love the personal touch.
Be flexible
It is often difficult to be flexible with all the decisions required in the marketplace. So if you want to be more flexible and still be consistent, you must pay attention to even the small details in dealing with employee decisions.
Make your employee interaction stand out with simple messages and involve employees in as many decisions as you can.
Listen and hear
A Chinese proverb once said if you don’t like to smile don’t open a shop. The same goes for being a person who doesn’t like to deal with people. Nothing is more damaging to a business.
Listen, hear, and observe closely. Find the unspoken messages. Make listening and observing your core competences. You don’t gain insights by talking. Ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s important to keep your ears open to new ideas and insight.
Leaders need to be good listeners for everyone, from customers to employees to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it. Listening also helps a leader get multiple perspectives. When making a decision, a good leader always listens to a number of different people. They know they own the final decision but always make sure they get input from multiple people.
Now more than ever, things are changing at blazing speed. Employees notice businesses that are stuck in time, refusing to learn.
There is only two ways to keep up. They are continuous learning and applying what you learn. Spend time understanding changing trends and patterns. Apply them as often as you can. And most importantly, solicit the help of your employees.
Communicate clear expectations
Don’t like networking either on or off-line? Not sure why you are in business, are you? This is true for employees and customers
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of being social on-line. Building an effective network takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. Schedule time to make it happen and devote the energy required. Get your employees involved.
Always, always put employees first
Employees should always come first, they are your business. No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for the best people and then take care of them. They are the lifeblood of the business. They then will take great care of customers.
When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees. Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common, an important element in being a leader. Here are two additional perspectives from exceptional business leaders:
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
– Walt Disney
You have to treat your employees like customers.
– Herb Kelleher
Being socialable
Be social … walk around and connect on multiple levels. Connected leaders quickly become multiplier leaders. Multiplier leaders know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is not the lone genius, but rather the leader who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone around them.
Inspire and energize
Share your passion. Show compassion and share positive energy always.
A quality of great leaders is being able to clearly articulate ideas and get people excited and inspired about them. It’s not selling people on an idea, it’s inspiring them.
Getting a person to work with a leader when they’re not obligated is more than just inspiring them. It’s about ensuring people have fun and are energized with passion. Many charities get people to volunteer for them by inspiring and energizing a noble cause. They say that if you donate, you’ll be spending your time working toward something greater than yourself. This inspires people to take a few hours to work for a charity promoting a cause they believe in.
Coaching and mentoring
Mentor and develop self-esteem and a positive attitude. We have written on employees’ positive attitude on several occasions. Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It often trickles down from leaders, but it needs to happen more by design. Your business can never be what it can be if you don’t focus on employee happiness.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll have dozens of people criticize you. Customers, current and former employees (whether you know it or not), and family and friends may give you constructive criticism. It can be stressful to hear or read, and it can be easy to pass on criticism to employees. But it doesn’t help that much. As a leader, you should ensure employees have high self-esteem in their job.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for yourself and your employee team?
Need some help in finding ways to motivate and engage your employee team? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
