Q & A: Lewis P. Carhone. (Marketing News).

Engineering the Customer Experience

Lou Carbone is the founder, president and chief experience officer of Experience Engineering Inc., Minneapolis. He and his company help organizations create loyalty by managing and aligning the experiences they deliver.

Q: What exactly do you mean by "customer experiences"?

A: It's what the customer sees, smells, tastes, touches and feels. In addition, it's the environment; the processes, the way people interact with other people in the environment The customer experience is everything going on at multiple levels and results from an intricate weaving of clues into the environment The goal is to manage experiences to create a specific emotional outcome for the customer.

Q: Does the same approach work for improving employee experiences?

A: Absolutely.

Q: What are "dues"?

A: Clues work across all the senses. Clues come from the humanics--all those things emitted by humans--and the mechanics, the processes and environment or what could be called the physical elements of the experience. What we are constantly aware of is that humanics and mechanics can't be separated from one another.

Q: Based on your work with the Walt Disney Co., can you give us some examples of clues used in Disney World?

A: Sure. When you enter the Magic Kingdom, the street is inclined and the building facades are sloped to make the street appear longer than it is. At the beginning of your visit; the prospect of a Walk down a fairly long street to the castle is welcome. But once you've arrived at the castle, the opposite is true; the journey back appears shorter. Most people never notice this due. But it is very, very powerful. Also at Disney, there is always a trash con in view, suggesting littering is not acceptable behavior. There are literolly thousands of such experience clues planted in the Disney theme park experience. And they work.

Q: How do you engineer customer experiences for your clients? What tools do you use?

A: How do people approach messy problems? We use lots of tools and take lots of "snapshots" to gather different pieces of evidence. The connections, the constructs come from the mind of the consumer. We use observation, mystery shopping, bag camero, a unique research tool called ZMEI among others, to study 'frame by frame" what is happening, the body language, what people are feeling. Our job is to understand the topogrophy, to give clients a 3-D perspective. This is true data mining and very, very different than most marketing research which is mostly one-dimensional.

Q: Why aren't more comparies getting this right?

A: Because they wont it to be easy. They are looking for silver bullets to dramatically change what they are doing. They don't realize that they have to develop experience management systems overtime. This is not about writing yourself a theme or a song. It's not the ho key pokey. This is 350 times more powerful than that

Q: Can any business engineer its customer experience?

A: Any organization can become more experience-driven and understand the value of the customer experience.

Q: How do you begin?

A: You begin by seeing your business from inside the customer's experience. It's not about being customer focused. It's about having the customer's perspective. There's a huge difference.

Q: And how can a business engineer the customer experience it delivers?

A: You work through a customer experience moment by moment; second by second. You weigh how an experience contributes to how you feel. We call it experience immersion. That's how you begin to develop a central nervous system for experiences.