What Are Customer Experience Centers?
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” This quote from Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs lays out the importance of really noticing and paying attention to your customers. You have to know what your customers care about and provide them with value before they even demand it from you.
A company’s success comes down to customer experience. What is customer experience? Essentially, it encompasses how customers perceive and feel about your brand after interacting with your team, websites, products, and/or services. How do you want customers to see your company? As reliable? Trustworthy? A thought leader? Whatever image you have in your mind, you have to convince your customers and prospects of it. After all, without the customers, you wouldn’t have a company to run.
Having a customer experience center can help with that. These spaces offer you a chance to personally introduce your customers to your company and build a relationship with them.
What Is an Experience Center?
Customer experience centers (CECs) are spaces in which companies invite prospective and current customers, investors, partners, and sometimes even internal employees to learn more about the company. Specifically, you’ll want to educate them on its history, its values and mission, and its offerings. Your company can also use it to get feedback from customers about their values and what they think of your company overall, as well as what you offer.
When setting up a CEC, keep in mind that you don’t merely want to stand in front of a room and talk at customers for hours on end. The most memorable experiences are those that come with a story, not just facts and statistics. You have to take advantage of innovative ideas to improve the customer experience. These ideas include:
- Providing interactive discussions and activities during presentations to get the customers involved and having fun.
- Allowing hybrid events that champion equitable engagement so that those who cannot travel to your CEC can still participate.
- Using a variety of technologies, such as monitors, tablets, multimedia, and more to stimulate the senses of hearing, seeing, and touching.
In a CEC, you should show customers what differentiates you from the competition. With interactive activities and state-of-the-art technology like what Alleo offers, you’ll show your customers that your company is innovative and personable.
What Are the 3 Levels of Experience?
For a CEC to work, you have to create an experience that appeals to your prospective and current customers on three different levels:
- Rational: On this level, you focus on the customers’ logic. You’ll want to provide concrete details on why your company stands out from competitors. When you provide statistics on how many customers you serve, how quickly you ship your goods, or any other hard facts, you indicate to your customers that you are the logical solution to their problems.
- Emotional: Appeals to customers’ emotions rely more heavily on presenting customers with the benefits of using your products or services. How can you help them? What do you offer that will make their lives easier? How well do you relate to your customers and their pain points? Answering these questions will make it easier for a customer to relate to your mission and to trust you. It’s important to note that people connect with a brand on a deeper level when they hear about your story. That’s because your story humanizes your brand in the eyes of the customer and helps them grow that emotional connection. Include your story in presentations to really connect with your audience.
- Subconscious: This level of experience is the most complex and hardest to achieve. It speaks to how customers perceive your company outside of their conscious state and what they experience directly in the CEC. For example, if you use gender neutral terms in your presentations or activities, all participants, no matter their gender identity, may feel that you care about them. While some of these actions may not have been your intent, nor do participants notice it on a conscious level, it can still dictate their overall image of your company. Continuing to offer positive rational and emotional experiences can boost the subconscious one.
What Are the Objectives of a Customer Experience Center?
The common customer experience objectives when it comes to experience centers in particular are:
- Tailor different experiences to different audiences. Sometimes you’ll want to teach customers about your history, mission, values, products, and services and get their feedback. Other times, you may use a CEC for a sales pitch. Either way, you should aim to give your customers everything they need to make an informed decision when looking for a solution to their problems. Setting the experience up to fit the goal of your CEC will help you do that.
- Relate to your customers. When you discuss your values and mission with your customers, you give them a way to relate to you. They may have the same values as you do. Including icebreakers and other interactive opportunities in your CECs will also show your customers that you care about getting to know them and learning how they think. Alleo allows you to conduct these activities with both in-person and virtual attendees. The Choice Exercise is a template Alleo offers for icebreakers.
- Make memories for your customers. Creating an immersive experience for your customers will make their interactions with you memorable. Collaboration equity is important here. If everyone gets a chance to speak instead of the most extroverted people dominating conversations, then they are more likely to have a good experience and a positive view of your company. This is why the Alleo platform offers various verbal and nonverbal forms of communication. People less likely to voice their opinions verbally can easily express their feelings on a matter via the platform’s chat feature, polling, voting, emoji reactions, and more.
When you work to build relationships with your prospective and current customers through CECs, you are more likely to earn their trust and their business. That, in turn, can lead to a better brand reputation and even more business down the line.
How Do I Create an Experience Center? With Alleo
If you want to create a unique, memorable customer experience center, turn to Alleo. With our tools, you can create a customized CEC that helps both your company and your customers to get the most out of the experience, no matter whether they participate in person or online. Make interactive presentations, self-guided workshops with intuitive navigation, and breakout rooms you can monitor from a single screen.
With Alleo, the CECs you create will not only get your customers involved, but they will also help your customers become part of your brand. To learn more about what we can do to help you drive engaging, collaborative customer experiences, contact us.
