The customer experience blog

Robert Stephens, founder of The Geek Squad, the IT support company that changed the way consumer technology support is delivered, has a great quote on how a distinctive customer experience makes marketing spend almost unnecessary in some cases:

Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.

I love that. Robert takes a distinctive approach to marketing. I remember once interviewing him whilst he was driving his car, for one of our books. I kept hearing a swishing sound. I asked what it was. Robert answered it was cars overtaking him. Not him overtaking other cars. Other cars overtaking his Geek Squad-branded vehicle. I apologised if I was slowing him up and he laughed and said it was his policy.

Robert had worked out that if he drove at a couple of miles under the speed limit, three times as many cars would see the Geek Squad branding on his car as they passed than if he kept up with the traffic.

The Geek Squad is like living theatre or, as Robert calls his band of technology fixers, with their Dragnet-style faux cop cars, FBI-style badges and NASA Geek chic short-sleeved shirts, white socks and clip on ties, "a living comic book".

Now, Robert Stephens is a man who knows how to create a distinctive customer experience and build the whole business upon it. He's recently gone into partnership with one of our clients, Carphone Warehouse, to bring the Geeks to the UK, having gone from strength to strength with his alliance with Best Buy in the US.
We'll feature more of The Geek Squad in this blog in future, and the lessons you can learn from them in building a customer experience that makes you stand out from your commodity-like competitors. In the meantime, here are a couple of Geeks with a fan of theirs - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:
Posted by: Shaun Smith for smith+co

IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group) announced recently that they are deepening the design of their customer experience by creating signature smells for their hotels as part of their guest experience.

This makes a lot of sense. The sense of smell accounts for 70 per cent of what our emotional recall is based on, according to some researchers.

So, do you design the smell and other senses such as the sound of your customer experience? Most organizations don't. BMW does. They design in that 'new car smell' on purpose because research says their customers like it. They tune the exhaust to 'sound like a BMW'. They understand that the 'ultimate driving experience' is one that engages all the senses.

Kjell Nordstrom, the economist, recently explained how Chris Bangle, the BMW design guru, took him on a tour of BMW's 'door room' - a giant hangar full of car doors mounted on rigs, with engineers all over the place slamming the doors shut and recording the sounds of the doors. It's how they get that satisfying and reassuring BMW 'thunk' sound as the car door closes.

Designing the 'sound' of your experience is a concept most organisations don't even address because even the word 'design' has visual origins, so excludes sound. But, here's an example of what it can achieve: At Glasgow airport they play natural, ambient sounds (birds singing, plus soothing chillout music underneath it) over the loudspeakers to relax travellers. Sales in the airport shops went up 10%.(No, it wasn't birdseed...)

So, smell and sound are part of your customer experience. If you don't design them in, you leave them to chance. But we know that the biggest impact on how we feel about an experience is the behaviour of the people that deal with us and yet that is often overlooked because it is intangible. In our book See, Feel, Think, Do, we analyse how you need to take into account the senses, how your customers feel and indeed your own gut instinct when running your organisation.

smith+co We recently worked with a global hotel group on creating the desired emotional experience for guests, as part of a major brand refresh exercise. Leading organisations are increasingly realising that the customer experience is integral to the brand and must be 'engineered' not just left to the front-line to figure out for themselves. Do contact us if this is the kind of help you need in developing your own customer experience.

Posted by: Shaun Smith for smith+co

Virgin has refined its Upper Class customer experience still further.

You may have seen their new campaign, which is all about whizzing through security to their clubhouse. The point is that Virgin chooses to compete on the customer 'touchpoints' (the parts of your business process that touch the customer, affect how they feel about you, and collectively make up their customer experience) that other airlines do not even think about. Whilst the other airlines are trying to win the battle on new ways to serve chicken, Virgin has recognised that the average frequent flyer would do just about anything to avoid the zoo they call security at Heathrow. Here's the ad:



It was Virgin that first thought to reinvent the customer experience in airport lounges with its 'Clubhouse'. When Virgin Airlines' CEO Steve Ridgway's team first came up with the idea of transforming airport lounges into cool, relaxing places to be, they came up against unexpected opposition.

They customer-tested plans for a hairdresser, virtual reality ski machines and other novel features that had never been seen in an airport lounge before. But, customers gave it the thumbs down.

Ridgway and Branson decided to over-rule the research and go with their gut feel, which told them that customers couldn't imagine the experience, but once they saw it for real, they would fall in love with it.

It turned out they were right. This is a useful lesson when using customer research to market test new ideas for changing your customer experience - Customers will tend to ask for more, cheaper, better. It's sometimes up to you to come up with the unexpected innovation which the customers themselves might not 'get' until you show it to them. What this requires though, is complete clarity on who your target customers are and what your brand stands for. Only then can you innovate successfully. As Richard Branson puts it "Daring to be daft".

Hence the emphasis on the power of instinct in business decision-making in our book See, Feel, Think, Do.

Posted by: Shaun Smith for smith+co