Does your business have a customer experience center? If not, then you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to meaningfully connect customers with your brand. If you do have a customer experience center, then there may be proactive changes you can make to create more meaningful interactive events.
Customer experience centers help you build deep, lasting relationships with prospects that can lead to increased sales and a stronger brand image. In this article, we’ll prepare your for the future of customer experience by covering:
- What experience centers are and will be in the future
- Why experience centers are important
- How to create and improve experience centers
Let’s get started!
What Are Experience Centers?
Customer experience centers are typically a physical space located at an enterprise business’s headquarters where that business can give customers, investors, and other stakeholders immersive experiences. As organizations have shifted to hybrid models, so must experience centers. The future of experience centers relies on a mix of digital and physical content and experiences. Innovating this way allows companies to enable customers to connect with their brand on a deeper level than simply sending out a slide deck. Here are some customer experience center examples of how a business could set up their space to prepare for the future of customer experience (CX):
- Presentation Focused: This setup enables a business to give their pitch in an immersive, branded setting. The layout of the room can include product displays and company history to help tell the brand’s story. Presenters can work off one or more screens in the same location, and the focus is mostly on the presenters.
- Multiple Displays: This setup encourages audience participation. With access to multiple screens, participants can form breakout groups and interact with your content in real time. Because this setup is designed for digital engagement, it is easier to include hybrid audiences.
- Walkthrough Displays: This setup combines multiple content stations to provide an immersive experience. With walkthrough displays, you can guide participants through your brand’s story so they can see your growth and key differentiators. These displays can be anything from banners to digital displays to interaction stations.
In many ways, customer experience centers are like museums. They are designed to capture their audience’s attention while delivering key information in an exciting way. Think about walkthrough exhibits where you can see how armor changed through time, interactive stations where you can dig for fossils, or 360 degree planetarium shows.
Businesses can take the same approach to attract, excite, inform, and ultimately persuade attendees, which will only become more important as markets grow increasingly competitive.
What Are Brand Experiences?
Brand experiences are experiences that your company delivers for your audience with a clear connection to your business. These experiences are similar to branded content. Think about helpful infographics that you can send out to customers through an email newsletter. The main purpose of that graphic is to educate your audience and provide value, but it also includes your branding so readers associate that value with your business. Nearly any interaction a customer has with your brand can cause a reaction, or a branded experience. Consider the following situations:
- A customer realizes that you switched to eco friendly packaging and recommends your product to their environmentally conscious friends.
- Your Spotify commercials constantly interrupt a customer’s favorite playlist, so they become irritated and actively avoid your products.
- Your retail display allows customers to try out your product before purchasing it, so they feel more confident in buying from you.
Brand experience centers is another term for customer experience centers. These are the spaces where businesses can provide tailored experiences for their audience that build a positive association with their brand. In the examples listed above, you have less control over how customers react to your brand. You create and present your brand, customers react, and then you can adjust. For experiences in a brand experience center, your team can adjust to customer reactions in real-time to ensure a positive reaction. You can also tailor experience centers to inspire emotions, which you have a lot less control over when your product is on the shelves of an independent retailer. According to McKinsey, Gen Z strongly prefers doing business with companies that align with their personal values. The future of customer experience is communicating your values and how they match those of your audience.
What Are the Objectives of an Experience Center?
The objectives of a customer experience center are to support your business’s goals. Since objectives vary from business to business, it’s important to ensure internal alignment instead of taking a blueprint from a different organization and immediately applying it to yours.
For example, many businesses will want their customer experience center to help turn leads into customers or convince existing customers to purchase more. However, some businesses will also use these spaces to pitch future plans to investors. Depending on which goal your business is pursuing, you can tailor your space to support it. To attract more customers, you might focus on displaying existing products. For investor presentations, you might show off prototypes and present future plans. In order to stay flexible and prepare for whatever the future may hold, you need a customizable presentation software. At Alleo, we have you covered with versatile presentation building features—all in one platform.
What Are 3 Pillars of the Essential Customer Experience?
The three essential pillars of customer experience are customers, experiences, and values.
1. Customers
It might seem obvious, but it’s worth remembering that customers—or investors or other stakeholders—should be at the center of your customer experience strategy. That means designing your space to deliver experiences your audience is interested in participating in, not what your business wants to present. There will often be significant overlap between these categories, but think about the key difference this way:
According to a Gallup poll, 70% of customers make purchasing decisions based primarily on emotions, while 30% lead with logic. Yet, traditional economic theories assume that customers act rationally. For future success, businesses should therefore tailor experience centers to cause an emotional response that is supported by data, not the other way around.
2. Experiences
If your current play for customer outreach is scheduling a video call and clicking through a slide deck, you’re missing out on a valuable chance to stand out from your competition—especially with big-name prospects. After all, which businesses aren’t doing the same exact thing? And at the enterprise level, many of your competitors will be using customer experience centers to build relationships with their target audience.
Even when pitching to virtual attendees, you can still go beyond slide decks. With Alleo, you can take a future-centric approach by creating and delivering interactive presentations for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events. Key benefits include:
- Opportunities for audience engagement in real-time
- Collaboration equity that encourages participation from all attendees
- Easy-to-use templates to kick-off interactive meetings
With engaging technology, you can transform meetings into interactive experiences that show your customers the value you provide instead of just telling them.
3. Values
As we mentioned earlier, customers respond more to emotions than reason. In other words, customers tend to get more excited over your brand’s value than the data you present. Because of this, your customer experience center should tell your brand’s story and exemplify your values.
For example, displaying product prototypes through the years can show customers that you value innovation. If your customers care about doing business with cutting-edge companies, then they’ll be more likely to buy from you. For future-forward prospects, it helps to prove that you’re thinking ahead, too. With Alleo’s advanced yet easy-to-use interface, you can impress audiences that value innovation.
Why Should We Improve CX?
Businesses should improve their customer experience model to:
- Convert leads into customers
- Turn current customers into repeat buyers
- Increase market share
- Build brand loyalty
Customer experience centers help achieve these goals, and more, by involving customers in immersive experiences that help them build a deeper connection with your brand.
High-quality customer experience is also essential for businesses because advertising alone isn’t enough to stand out from competitors. Consider this: Forbes reports that the average consumer is exposed to at least 4,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. It’s a noisy world with a ton of distractions. Customer experience centers remove distractions and allow you to engage with fully-attentive customers. By building closer relationships with your prospects, you can also get a better idea of who your ideal customer is and what they value, which can be useful when developing future marketing strategies.
How Do I Create an Experience Center for the Future?
If you’re an enterprise-level business, you may already have an experience center that you can improve with tailored layouts and interactive technology. If you don’t already have a dedicated space, it can be advantageous to start with your desired capabilities and the technology that can achieve them, then design the space around those elements.
Whether upgrading your current customer experience center or designing a new space from scratch, it’s critical to consider both physical and digital elements and how they interact with each other and your attendees. Because of the nature of hybrid and remote work, it’s also important to design your space to be able to accommodate in-person and virtual attendees.
Some key elements include:
- Monitors to display presentations (touch screens can make interactive activities more accessible).
- Branded content (displayed on monitors or banners) to communicate valuable information such as your brand’s history and values.
- Audio and visual equipment that has been tested for in-person and virtual experiences.
- Software that enables equitable collaboration and encourages engagement.
- Physical room layout that guides attendees through branded content.
What Is the Role of Technology in Customer Service?
Technology is at the heart of the future of customer experience. According to CX research conducted by Statista, interaction management technology is experiencing the second highest growth rate among customer experience tech (only outpaced by AI-driven engagement). It’s no secret why. Customer experience analytics can show you how satisfied your current customers are and how likely they are to continue doing business with you. This data can also show you what current customers value most about your services as well as what they wish you offered, so you can respond accordingly.
Some of the primary benefits of customer experience technology is that it can negate some of the negative impact of technology on customer service. With advancements in technology, it became easier than ever to reach out to customers. While this was convenient, it also led to an overabundance of content that bombards customers, making it difficult for any one brand to stand out. Customers are burned out from repetitive, cookie-cutter content and meetings that fail to grab their attention.
With customer experience centers of the future, that’s no longer the case. Interactive meeting software enables you to regain your customers’ attention through personalized, interactive experiences. Long story short, the role of technology in customer service is to make business a two-way street. Instead of companies overwhelming customers with content, each party can contribute to a conversation that addresses everyone’s needs.
What Is the Next Evolution of CX? Alleo.
Customer experience best practices are constantly evolving. Alleo is here to help you take advantage of new expectations, so you don’t get left behind. The future of customer experience is interactive experiences, and Alleo has the technology to enable your business:
- Interactive whiteboards that allow all participants to contribute in real-time, instead of waiting to speak or type their thoughts out in a chat
- Integrated, multimedia presentations in one central canvas that enable your team to captivate your audience without needing to transfer back and forth between applications
- Engaging activities that keep your audience on their toes, like a wall of praise and a choice exercise ice-breaker
To see the difference that interactivity makes, see our platform in action and schedule a demo today!
