Elevating the Visitor Experience Within Your Marketing Environment
When engaging your experience center visitors, analytical facts and proof points alone may not cut it.
If your customers are anything like the world at large, they are likely hungering for something beyond the standard experience. They are looking for enchantment.
If you want to make a lasting impression on your audience, you need to rethink the experience you provide. In Wunderman Thompson’s report, The Age of Re-enchantment, they highlighted how consumers are seeking to be more fully engaged and surprised by the brands they interact with. Feeling burnt out from work or current events, people are seeking uplifting and out-of-the-ordinary touchpoints with brands to pull them out of the monotony they’ve gotten accustomed to. Whether it’s a coffee shop, an in-store purchase, or a business meeting, people are seeking to experience the unexpected.
You already know a high level of customization is a key element to establishing a world class experience center. So how do you use the customization of your program to make the common elements of a briefing an enchantingly uncommon experience?
If you can nail down the answers to the following questions with your team, you’ll be well on your way to elevating the visitor experience in your marketing environment:
What makes us…us?
Whether you answer that question with a focus on your company’s history, your brand, or your products and services, the unique qualities of your company can help anchor your briefing program and the impression you want to leave with your visitors.
What are all the existing visitor touchpoints in our experience center?
Your briefing program might include the arrival, check-in, discussion around pain points and needs, a PowerPoint presentation by an SME, a tour of the experience center, and a conclusion. Are there any other in-between moments you have? Make a list of the current touchpoints of your program, including the in-between moments such as a coffee break, a self-guided tour within a room, or a video.
Which of these moments are ripe for elevation?
Looking at all the touchpoints in your end-to-end experience, where are the areas of opportunity to elevate moments from ordinary to the extraordinary? For doing a common thing in an uncommon way? Use the distinctions you identified from the question above to guide the adjustments you make. You want your audience to feel like they're part of something unique and individual to them versus being the average visitors who views a standardized PowerPoint presentation with a list of product or service benefits. Consider how your brand and products could be the very thing that creates a moment of delight.
When our client, ABB, was renovating a recently-acquired customer experience center, we incorporated their reputation as a global leader in robotics to influence the visitor experience. Instead of the mundane experience of checking in and receiving visitor credentials from a staff member, Derse had the idea for ABB to task YuMi, one of their robots, with the processing and delivery of visitor credentials. As a result, they immerse their visitors in the effectiveness of their products from the moment they walk through the door and provide a moment for their visitors to marvel the unique experience.
What makes this approach to your briefing program so effective is that it’s bigger than just a tactic for a marketing environment; it’s a lens through which you can view your entire face-to-face marketing program. Where can you elevate a transaction into an interaction? Where can you do a common thing in an uncommon way? And the good news is that unexpected moments of engagement don’t necessarily require a large investment; changes could be accomplished within your existing budget. With clarity on the impression you want your visitors to leave with and intentionality in customizing the experience, you can create moments of surprise or delight for your marketing environment visitors.
Ready to start brainstorming how you can surprise and delight your customers? Press play on our playlist to have an inspiring soundtrack for your brainstorming session.
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