Most cultural organizations are focusing in on customer experience as a key to long-term success. Visitors who have a good experience, come again, and again. They bring other people, they talk about you, they may even turn from visitors to donors.
But when we think about customer experience, we often do so with blinders on. Let's say you're a history museum. What's the customer experience? A family walks in to the museum, pays admission, visits galleries, maybe interacts with some guides or docents, checks out the gift shop on the way out, and leaves.
With that perspective, how do we improve customer experience? We make sure visitors can easily find the admission desks, we train employees to be friendly and welcoming, we focus on great content in the galleries, we have fun and interesting items in the gift shop.
There are 2 problems with this kind of brainstorming. #1: It is focused on the customer experience from the perspective of the institution only. #2 (and following from #1): It leaves out the Why.
#1. Institution-focused perspective
Think about the experience of going out for ice cream. What does it look like? You pull up to the shop with your family, head inside, look at the many choices, make your selections, pay, eat and enjoy the ice cream, and leave.
Okay, take the first one. You pull up to the shop. Hang on a sec. What happened before you pulled up? Well, you had to decide which ice cream shop to go to. What about before that? You had to decide to take the whole family out to ice cream. Maybe it was a choice between ice cream or a different treat. Maybe this is a routine thing you do on Wednesday nights. Maybe you're celebrating something or someone special.
Now the other side. What happens after you leave? You worry about sticky hands on the car upholstery. You laugh and joke on the way home. Your kids thank you for the outing. You post photos on your blog of the family trip.
Lesson? There's a whole lot more to getting ice cream than what happens at the shop.
As I talked about earlier, you can look at customer experience as having 5 parts: Entice (when people are thinking they want what you have), Enter (investigating you, calling, looking up online), Engage (decided to come or to purchase), Exit (conclude visit or purchase), Extend (think about it, talk about it, want it, later on). Institutions usually focus on the third, Engage. But your customers' experience has already started and will continue after.
#2. Getting at Why.
It's important to recognize this wider range of the customer experience because it will help you think about the why behind your customer engagement. When you think about how people got to you, you start to think about why they came. What situation were they in? What need were they trying to fill? Is it different for different people?
Asking these questions will help you think about what to change once visitors get to the Engage step. It will also help you think about how you can reach your visitors before they get to that step, and what potential their is for extending beyond the engage/exit.
Want to incorporate this thinking in your organization?
Here's a simple strategy to use to get people thinking in these broader terms of the customer experience. On small cards, write down brief sentences describing a typical experience (getting ice cream, buying golf clubs). Include sentences from each of the 5 aspects of the customer experience. Have some of the cards be positive things (found a parking space!) and some be negative things (couldn't figure out how to call customer service). Shuffle the cards up, and have people sort through the cards to put them in order of what they would do in this experience. Once they do this, draw the analogy to your organization. How would you re-write some of the cards for our organization? Push the card up higher if we're doing this well. Push it down lower if we're doing it poorly. What do we need to work on?
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