The Communication Resolution
What Experience are you committed to causing for others?
You cannot not communicate. Everything you do tells THOSE IN YOUR LIFE how much you do or don’t care about them. -Bruce Loeffler
As I pontificate on the items that I want to improve for my family, my business and for me personally in 2016, I cannot help but to return the to the one ingredient that I have worked hard to build a career and my life around. While I often fall short of the exceptional and even my own standards, it is this one precept that sustains me and yet at times eludes me as I strive to be a better person. This precept, this notion rather, is the intentional focus on the Experience that I am causing for other people.
Whether the people I connect with are family, clients, guests, friends or even casual acquaintances, the Experience that I am dedicated to creating for them and the Experience that I actually manufacture is the one cornerstone for success or failure in my endeavors…and sometimes theirs.
Customer Experience Essentials – Using All Six Senses
Did you know that there is a 6th sense that is critical to achieving customer satisfaction and excellent relational service? In last week’s blog “Customer Experience Essentials – Utilizing the Five Senses” we covered the importance of utilizing Sight, Scent and Sound and how Disney uses each. This week, I want to briefly cover Taste and Touch and then expound on the always important and typically under represented Sixth Sense.
Taste
With nearly 100 restaurants on Disney property, the sense of taste plays a large role in the Guest Experience. Especially at Epcot, variety is the order of the day. From the Biergarten in Germany to the Katsura Grill in Japan to the Nine Dragons Restaurant in China to to Restaurant Marrakesh in Morocco and even the Liberty Inn at the American Pavilion, taste is paramount. Never underestimate the appetite of American consumers – and the attention to detail they give in their opinions on food quality and quantity.
A new company called Intentional Chocolate is taking the notion of the edible Experience to an entirely new level. It is utilizing a concept of “embedding good intentions,” where there is a cerebral process of placing good thoughts and vibes into the ingredients before serving. According to the company’s double-blind test at the University of Wisconsin, the researchers tested the well-being of consumers after partaking of Intentional Chocolate versus other forms of chocolate – and it works! the Intentional Chocolate improved the overall mood of the consumers by more than 67 percent over the normal chocolate sample. Whether it is meditation, prayer, or just extra care when preparing and delivering a meal, there is a credible reason to concentrate on the intentions and the Impressions that go into the food and drink within the Experience deliverable.
Touch
Walt Disney World is designed around the sense of touch and feel, which is used to gather and to convey information. For instance, a handshake in our culture reveals a lot of information to another person. A limp handshake denotes reluctance or lack of confidence, whereas a strong grip signifies confidence or control. The feel of the room or environment is very important. It’s amazing what happens when the temperature of the movie theater, hotel room or restaurant is too high or too low; it really has the power to kill the Experience, doesn’t it?
Emotion
Some call emotions the sixth sense. Emotions are powerful, as is the ability to positively influence the emotions of others. Advertisers and companies have long made an effort to capitalize on the emotions of consumers as they promote their products and services. Sir Richard Branson once said, “I’ve never been particularly food at numbers, but I think I’ve done a reasonable job with feelings. And I’m convinced that it is feelings – and feelings alone – that account for the success of the Virgin Brand in all of its myriad forms.” Emotions evoke memories, and memories influence action – often to repeat the past, thus creating loyalty and an affinity for specific brands and services.
There are four emotion driven chemicals released by the human brain that can bring about action through an ExperienceL endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Endorphins provide physical drive and endurance, while dopamine helps us achieve our goals and makes sure we get things done. Serotonin gives us pride and self-confidence, and oxytocin is the chemical behind love and acts of kindness.
- Driving the Experience toward the release of endorphins is created by excitement and the thrill of the hunt. Disney does this by creating anticipation throughout its parks and their presentations – and even while you stand in line.
- Driving the Experience toward the release of dopamine is created by generating a feeling of accomplishment and pride through specific results. Some visitors experience this feeling of accomplishment simply by making it to one of their destinations. The immediate impressions upon entrance are overwhelmingly positive. Disney also makes a habit of special rewards like Club 33 for Disney VIPs, the Vacation Clubs, and the myriad of other opportunities to feel as if you have earned something extraordinary.
- Driving the Experience toward the release of serotonin is created by special recognition and approval. Disney does this by making everyone feel like a guest and as if he or she was important – and by making guests feel as if they are a part of the show, for example, by going as far as to include them in a performance or by taking action photos of the during the Experience.
- Driving the Experience toward the release of oxytocin is created by fostering a sense of love and belonging, community, and communication in the employee and customer base. Disney does this by creating such a memorable Experience that people feel compelled to become Ambassadors just to share and compare their Experience with others. Disney is not just a destination; it’s a community.
(The above information is an excerpt from The Experience: The 5 Principles of Disney Service and Relationship Excellence.)
Customer Experience Essentials – Utilizing the Five Senses
Equipped with five senses, man explores the universe and calls it science. – Edward Powell Hubble
Disney World is a master at using the five senses. It employs individuals whose expertise focuses on how to best utilize sight, scent, sound, taste and touch. Disney also studies virtually everything about guests’s desires and habits. There is a reason why Disney uses yellows, reds, bright blues, and purples so often: because they are warm colors. Consider the characters clothing: Mickey’s red pants, Minnie’s purple bow, and Donal’s blue coat. Inside the park, Disney has used these colors throughout the landscape. Through trial and error and expert color analysis, Disney has made a point to dress the park in happiness and incorporate the warm pigments from the color palette.
Can you remember back to when you were younger and had an epic evening with someone? Even thought it has been 10, 20 or 30 years since the event, every time you small that scent, hear that song, or see that place, a flood of emotions and memories brings you right back to that night. The senses and the triggers in your brain create some of the most powerful thoughts and memories you can draw on.
The Five Senses
Sight: The U.S. Department of Labor suggested in a recent study that 83 percent of human experiential learning is derived from sight. The remaining 17 percent is derived through the other senses – 11 percent through hearing, 3.5 percent through scent, 1 percent to 1.5 percent through touch, and 1 percent through taste.
Interior designers and executives in marketing and advertising know these statistics and take advantage of them. Experts in marketing know that certain colors tend to evoke distinct emotions. For instance, red is often used as a power color and tends to create conflict or action in people. Take the bull’s-eye logo and trademark of Target. Can you imagine a target being any other color than red? A soft pastel or sky blue just doesn’t evoke the same power and boldness.
Scent: Scent is critical to your success as well. Our sense of smell connects customers to an emotional Experience. Receptors in the nose are able to detect thousands of smells each day and often help forge an emotional bond within the brain. As pleasant smells often create happy or positive memories, unpleasant odors can do just the opposite and repel customers. Nasty odors like fish, garbage, and even improperly cleaned bathrooms are a real turnoff to customers and can keep them from returning.
Smell is also very closely linked to memory. According to various studies, smell consistently is more accurate at stimulating a memory than visual recollection.Much of what we smell has the power to quickly take us back to early memories. For example, when a former football player sets foot on a freshly cut athletic field, he is immediately transported back to his days on the gridiron. He gets a rush, dreaming of being able to go back in time and play one more game.
Sound: People often have a moment when they ask themselves, “Did they hear me?” The real question behind this is: “Was the other person even listening?” The distinction here is definitely a matter of choice. Hearing is merely an involuntary process that starts with noise, vibrations, the movement of fluid in the ears, and sound sent to the brain. It gets a little complicated when the noise actually arrives at its final destination of the brain, since this is where listening happens.
Listening is a voluntary act where we try to make sense out of the noise we hear, whether it’s your spouse telling you to run errands or your boss on your case about the latest sales figures. In any event, hearing and listening are very different because listening requires action on your part.
What does all this mean to you? In the derivation of an Experience, the objective is to have customers engaged to the extent that they are listening to your intent, your greeting, your instructions, and your excellence, not merely hearing.
(The above information is an excerpt from The Experience: The 5 Principles of Disney Service and Relationship Excellence.)
Next week as a follow up I will cover the remaining senses: taste and touch. Did you know that there’s a Sixth Sense that is equally important as the five we most commonly refer to? Stay tuned…
The Experience Summit Premieres In Nashville, TN
Exceptionals
By definition, the word Exceptional means “a rare instance, extraordinary, excellent and superior.” We can’t possibly expect to live up to these powerful words even with an above average effort or level of execution. The secret behind the Experience is the relational expertise and execution that comes from the people who own and are in charge of its delivery. In some ways, I would summarize my message with a slogan of “Creating Ambassadors of the Experience,” and it is impossible to deliver an exceptional Experience if the management team and employees are not prepared, empowered and responsible for the Experience. The only way to truly accomplish this and reach the level of exceptional is when the Experience has been internalized by each and every one of the people within the organization.
As many of the ideas surrounding our Principles of Service and Relational Excellence have been inspired by Disney, as they like to say it, the Experience begins “Back Stage.” The way that you treat your partners, staff and your fellow employees will ultimately correlate to the way that those colleagues treat and interact with your customers in your absence. We have five discussed four of the five underlying I. C.A.R.E. Principles (Impression, Connection, Attitude, Response and now Exceptionals.) While we present the Exceptionals last, they are truly the foundation to creating the exceptional Experience.
I would like to challenge you to begin to look at 3 areas of the Internal Experience for your management team, staff and employees.
1) Create Culture- Culture is Key. You must create, develop and protect your culture by consistently breathing the organization’s values into the lives of those that carry the deliverables and the brand message. You must build a culture dedicated to the exceptional Experience.
2) Foster Accountability- Accountability and personal ownership are synonymous. Whether you are a sole proprietor of a business or belong to an organization of thousands, you cannot have effective strategy or reach measurable goals without someone to champion said goals — or by assigning someone to be responsible for the results. Do try to walk in accountability, meaning the measurement of progress must be of mutual benefit. Holding people accountable rarely works.
3) Create Enjoyment- The secret of enjoyment is fulfillment. Do you and your people believe that you are making the world a better place, and that your customers and clients appreciate what you do? Anything you do for a living is worth doing with enjoyment. The key ingredient here is doing what you love and helping
The Response Principle
I think that we can all agree that The Experience that we are creating and delivering for our customers is important. There are actually “ Five Levels of The Experience”in all and as our team conducted a study of over 500 US based organizations, we found that 60% of those organizations were delivering average or even the worst level of Experience, which has been correctly identified as Toxic. Far too many individuals and too many companies are delivering “offensive” service.
This brings us to our next Principle in the I. C.A.R.E Customer Experience Model, the Response. The Response is the point at which we find the hallmark of customer service and the exceptional Experience. If your employees’reaction time, tone and talent do not match up with every other aspect of an excellent Experience, everything can be rendered useless. It can take vast amounts of effort to build up a relationship with a consumer, but only one negative Response to destroy it.
Responding to your clients or customers’ needs is all about delivering excellence in everything you do. You know all too well that your customers have choices about where to shop and with whom to do business. Until the past 15 years, customers could only choose which “big box” store they would patronize. Nowadays, the power of the internet and an increase in online purchasing opportunities (often at a reduced price) has made it necessary for our “in person” service to be much more effective than any service over the internet.
This poor service is often a result of a comfort level with the idea of average or a minimum level of service. If you strive for the minimum, you will end up with Toxic. Its as simple as that. The real issue with Average is that the companies who are comfortable with “just getting by” are very likely to deliver a Toxic Experience without realizing it. According to our model, both Toxic and Average Experiences fail to create potential Ambassadors. In fact, they often result in the opposite — the tendency for people to share negative perspectives from an unsatisfactory encounter.
I want to challenge you to begin to look at 3 areas of Response in relation to your customer Experience:
1) Have Empathy- Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What outcome do they desire?
2) Sense of Urgency- Nothing is more important than the question, complaint or desire of the customer.
3) Have a Process- Take inventory of the issues that arise and have a protocol for everything.
“Response” service is dedicated to helping each employee and company to deliver excellence in every “point of contact.” Service is ultimately about helping, serving and caring for others. Ask yourself, how well do you respond to the needs of your customers and clients?
The Attitude Principle
Attitude is the filter of everything you think, say and ultimately do. It is the lens in which you see the world and the outward expression of inward feelings. The experience begins with first impressions for the consumer, but for those in charge of the experience deliverables, the first and all-important ingredient is Attitude.
What is inside your mind and your heart is usually expressed by what you do. Renowned former college football coach Lou Holtz said it this way, “Ability is what you are capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” You can control who you are and whom you become by controlling the way that you think.
This is why we deliberately placed the principle of Attitude in the middle of our I. C.A.R.E Principles model as it is the glue of the entire mindset. Without the right Attitude, there is little reason to spend time on Impressions, Responses and Exceptionals as there will certainly be no Connections.
Over the years, there have been numerous studies and test groups to determine the correlation between attitude and success. We have narrowed it down to two primary areas of how people tend to get ahead on the job and in life. The first area is technical skills and knowledge. The second area is people skills and attitude. In search of a secret to success, here is what they found:
- 15% of successful outcomes are due to technical skills and knowledge
- 85% of successful outcomes are due to people skills and attitude.
However, the question should not be, “how we can be successful?” or “how we get the job done?” –but, “how do we become successful by making it better?”
Action: Attitude Principle- Think about it and Apply it
1) Make it a choice- You ultimately decide your attitude, not your surroundings
2) Have the Desire- To create the exceptional for your customers and your co-workers
3) Possess Optimism- See every issue as an opportunity to create the exceptional and make it better
In the conquest for the relational experience, the exceptional can only be unlocked by the right attitude and great people skills. We should all be looking to mold great attitudes, thus creating the Ambassador mindset internally, breathing life into our organizations, our deliverables, and the experiences we cause.
The Connection Principle
There are few companies who have been able to master the art of connecting personally with their customers. You see, relationships are the epicenter for all meaningful and long-term product and service associations. The beginning of the relational inflection path or the catalyst of the process of building a new relationship is the interaction between two individuals — which is essential to creating the experience.
Every customer wants to feel important. If your company doesn’t make that their top priority, it has already failed at delivering one of the basic components and foundational principles of the experience.
The Connection is a pivot point between contact and the relationship. Converting clients and customers from consumers to Ambassadors hinges on your ability to create the cerebral, emotional and personal connection. An “Ambassador” is so sold on your people, product and service that they become a walking advertisement for your company. The cost of not having them could be significant.
The secret to the Connection is not merely being nice. It is being valuable.
Action: Three Steps to Create Connection through Value:
1) Be Helpful (solution -oriented)
2) Make and Impact (Customized and authentic engagement)
3) Be Timely (response and follow up)
To make a strong connection, never forget that the value must be accompanied by exceptional and relational action. There should also be a degree of showmanship in every client interaction. Showmanship does not imply that something is fake. The excitement, the enjoyment and the Connection with the customer is not only real; it is delivered on a level that stands apart from other client/ employee engagements. The Connection Principle is a game changer if your goal is to convert customers to Ambassadors who tell the world about their exceptional Experience with your product, service or organization.
-Brian Church
The Impression Principle
Every person wants to feel important — and every consumer has a choice of where they do business. Consumers want and deserve to feel valued. Technology and social media capabilities give consumers the power to positively or negatively affect your brand. The experience you deliver at every interaction has an enormous impact on your bottom line.
Research shows that today’s customers are not just disappointed or dissatisfied, they are outraged. Reporter Brad Tuttle’s article in Time Magazine entitled “Customer Service Hell” tells us that while 80% of companies believe that they provide superior customer service, only 8% of clients feel that they receive superior service from these same companies. This highlights a tremendous opportunity for businesses that desire to gain a real competitive advantage. A 2010 Customer Experience Impact Report by Harris Interactive stated that 9 out of 10 customers would pay more to ensure a superior customer experience.
Of all of the Principles of the experience, perhaps the first one is most important. Before anything else in the customer service or customer experience model can become relevant, the organization must first master the Principle of the Impression.
Every customer has an Impression of every encounter they experience, and they can describe and file each of these Impressions under one of three classifications; positive, negative or neutral. Though “neutral” might seem like the absence of an Impression, it is every bit as critical as positive or negative. “Neutral” tells the customer that company did nothing to distinguish their service or themselves from their competitors. Average never inspired anyone. The individuals and the companies who provide indifferent or mediocre service leave the Impression that you are simply not important enough to them.
The “Impression” is so important because it is the epicenter that drives every inflection of the customer relationship. Every time a customer has any type of contact with any aspect of your business, they form an opinion. If you research behavioral science, you will find opinions usually result in action. Impressions form Opinions and opinions form actions: positive or negative, purchase or pass, repeat customer or never-visit-again-type actions.
Three Steps to a Great Impression
1) Be Intentional with your Impressions- Prepare, Practice and execute the interactions with every customer at every opportunity
2) Be Different- Innovate and create customized new ways to engage with your customers and clients
3) Be Consistent- How you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Become great at the art of the Impression
If your businesses was to provide a great “Experience” and a lasting Impression for your customers, you then become a superior company, eliminating need or desire for them to go elsewhere.
-Brian Church
Experience International 