Tag: immerse customers

Customers don’t care what you do. They only care what they are left with after you’ve done it. Especially with Dunn Tire and customer experience design.

Do you notice the customer experience you receive at a business you infrequently visit? With most customers, the answer is yes if the experience is bad. The extreme endpoints of the service experience. Occasionally however customers make note of a customer experience design that far exceeds expectations.

My wife and I experienced such a design at our local Dunn Tire store, where we had taken our car for our annual New York State safety inspection. I don’t know about you, but I notice a design set up like an awesome online experience, with all the information you will need all around you on the walls. Simply expressed and is very easy to speed read.

See our article on the 9 truths to improve customer experience and service design.)

What are the ways Dunn Tire uses its store design and employees to create the best possible customer experience? Consider Dunn’s explicit operations and design principles:

Educate your customers

Show the value

Create customer relationships

Stand tall on customer issues

Build trust

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. Not at Disney, where they have a ‘stroller guy’ whose entire job 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.

Learning Center

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. 

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 the lower-quality photos they take themselves.

Educating while getting the job done

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 cast 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.  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.

For as long as anyone could remember, the current and previous owners were extremely positive happy people.

Most folks assumed it was because they ran a successful business.

In fact, it was the other way around…

A tradition in the business was that the owner always wore a big lapel badge, saying Business Is Great!

The business was indeed generally great, although it went through tough times like any other company. What never changed however was the owner’s positive attitude, and the badge saying Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time invariably asked, “What’s so great about business?” Sometimes people would also comment that their own business was miserable, or even that they personally were miserable or stressed.

Anyhow, the Business Is Great! badge always tended to start a conversation, which typically involved the owner talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

Be human and show your personality

Businesses are made up of people … always show your enthusiasm and passion.

Listen to me

Help me complete my visit as quickly as possible, without seeking other help, or ‘handing me off’.

Be easy to work with and exceed expectations

…whenever you can. If you don’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including recommendations to other businesses.

Be honest

Always do what you say (promise). Credibility and trust really matter.

Always follow through promptly

… keep me informed until you can close.

What more design elements can be added?

What can your business apply from Disney operations that would improve your customer experience?

Please share a story about a creative customer experience design strategy with this community.

Remember, customers, create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

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 customer experience design. 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.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your customer experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

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 customer experience from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library: 

10 Laws of Customer Experience Design

What Little Things Small Businesses Can Do To Build Customer Relationships

Customer Experience Improvements Begin with Understanding Their Value