{"id":1051399,"date":"2024-03-12T23:52:37","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T06:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepetrovaexperience.com\/?p=34324"},"modified":"2024-03-12T23:56:29","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T06:56:29","slug":"what-is-customer-experience-for-built-environments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/what-is-customer-experience-for-built-environments\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Customer Experience for Built Environments?"},"content":{"rendered":"
A tweet grabbed our attention this week: “The Atlanta Airport (ATL) designers were like ‘and then what if we had them run 5k?’” In addition to making us laugh, this public passenger feedback stresses exactly what customer experience in your design-build project is. We are sure there was a reason for this suboptimal customer experience. As customer experience designers, we bring this kind of customer perspective to your design conversations before decisions can hurt your customer experience. Ultimately, customer experience (or passenger experience) comes down to how your end user interacts with your brand… your airport, transportation hub, hospital, facility.<\/p>\n
Each journey point, in and out of your physical space, is an opportunity to build a human-centered experience<\/strong> that makes your passenger (your customer, or end user) feel seen, guided, and cared for. Of course, some of those individual journey points carry more weight across the overall experience than others. And some offer more opportunities to elevate the experience.<\/p>\n Often, clients come expecting customer experience to be defined only by big budget items like Wow Moments (think indoor water installations, digital walls, immersive art experiences). What we remind them, and what we remind you as you lead your organization, is that Wow Moments, while newsworthy and exciting for overall brand reputation and engagement, can only come after<\/em> you meet the needs of your customers. You can\u2019t expect customers to stay on the journey – let alone remain engaged and aware – if you fail to meet their needs from the start. An immersive wall along a 5k walk may lower the pain of the passenger rushing to his gate. However, the fact remains there is a significant inconvenience that brings risk to the passenger journey. Who cares about the wall if I miss my flight? Or if I am an elderly passenger navigating without a wheelchair.<\/p>\n Capturing the Voice of the Customer is essential to designing human-centered passenger experience<\/strong>. What is the goal, or what we call “the job to be done” for your customer? What is his or her emotional state in the moments he\/she is navigating your facility?\u00a0 For instance, are they feeling frustrated? Are they comfortable? Design in the absence of knowing how your customer feels, what your customer needs and expects, or how your customer behaves along the journey points, results in a negative return on investment at best, and a PR nightmare at worst.<\/p>\n This is why research is an essential step in every design-build engagement<\/strong>. Start getting that research sooner rather than later in the planning or early design phase. Carry it through to the design and build phases. And sustain customer experience excellence of the facility by including feedback survey capture and analysis in the operations and maintenance phase of every project.<\/p>\n When the right research is in place, the voice of the customer helps to guide the design<\/strong> phase of projects. Including the customer perspective makes for some challenging conversations, trust me. But it is essential to drive ROI<\/strong> which is, at the end of the day, determined by utilization of your facility. If you build it well, in their interest, to serve their needs and meet their expectations, passengers will come. And they will stay and shop and enjoy your design elements and elevated experiences, like art work and interactive spaces. But you don\u2019t define what your passenger\u2019s needs and expectations are. They do.<\/p>\n There are real reputational risks to not meeting customer needs. This is what we call the PR nightmare<\/a>. If you think about it, good customer experience means no news. When you deliver the basics consistently across the customer journey, you move your passenger from Point A to Point B seamlessly. You are doing your job. In fact, seamless customer experience across US federal services is now mandated by executive order<\/a>. So seamless experience is a basic expectation of both customers and government. But its execution is complex. It involves the collaboration of designers, engineers, sub-contractors, and government stakeholders. A complexity that should remain invisible to the customer<\/strong> and yield a simple, easy experience.<\/p>\n Consider this from your passenger\u2019s perspective. \u201cI found the elevator where I needed it.\u201d Or \u201ceverything is where I expect it to be.\u201d These are not newsworthy statements. They indicate you met this customer\u2019s need. It felt invisible. Expected. On the other hand, when you do not have those basic, essential elements in place, problems arise.<\/p>\n Say there is a giant pole blocking the view of the elevator. Your passenger wanders around for ten minutes and misses their train. Now there is something to talk about. Now, you have reputational damage – PR problems. Next, your passenger is tweeting their frustration and seeking alternate means of transportation. They are avoiding your facility. Or spending as little time there as possible. That means they are not engaging with the space<\/strong> to purchase a coffee, meet a friend for lunch, or arrive early so they have time to shop before boarding their train. They certainly are not engaging with the million-dollar local art installation you hoped would be the talk of the town.<\/p>\n This is when the real questions start. Who is behind this? How did this experience failure happen? And it is when customer experience designers get called in late to the project, after it has become a public nightmare. Costs rise, utilization dips, and you move farther away from the ROI goals for the space<\/strong>.<\/p>\n World-class customer experience is not exclusively about news-making moments. It is about creating ease to the point of shifting user preference<\/strong>. Recently, we saw this clearly in an interview with a passenger of a major metropolitan transportation hub. When interviewed, the randomly selected passenger reported using the train for long distances was so easy, he now plans to choose air travel less frequently. He changed his preference to train travel \u2013 an overall longer trip \u2013 from short-haul air travel because of the experience he had across the journey, including at the stations. The world-class feeling he describes is built on ease of use, efficiency, and alignment to his needs across the journey. It also helps with our sustainability goals as a society.<\/p>\n Now, this is monetization of your asset<\/strong>. People are using it more. And monetization happens with throughput. The ROI is in the utilization. When you build it right, when you build it for them, the passengers come. They stay. And they tell their friends and colleagues to do the same. Because of the experience you built for your passengers, you move the needle on customer behavior.<\/p>\n This is preference substitution<\/strong>. And it is the holy grail of experience design. When you are designing a space, you want architects, engineers, experience designers and all project stakeholders to integrate preference substitution into their goals. It is literally the path to winning over your competition. Think about it. Set the goal of \u201cI want to hear a passenger say I would rather use the AirTrain than a cab.\u201d<\/p>\nMeeting Customer Needs Starts with Knowing Your Customer<\/h2>\n
No News is Good News<\/h2>\n
What is World-Class Customer Experience?<\/h2>\n