Creating Customer Experiences with Lessons Learned from Chocolate
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Posts by Kordell Norton
Experiences . . . or lack there of . . . could be the death of your business
Your customers continue to demand experiences. At Niagara Falls you can go and watch falling water, or board a sixty foot boat that is powered by three 500 horsepower engines and then drive through the class 5 rapids below the falls. Now THAT is an experience. Instead of looking through catalogs of caskets, at the Zabor Funeral Home in Cleveland, you are shown into a private display room where the represented ends of each casket are displayed on the walls. Because they want to extend the experience, they have converted a next door building into a food service facility to
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“Excuse me. You have a French fry sticking out of your nose.”
Five Guys hamburgers. Visions of red and white checked decor, with peanuts in shells to distract you while your burger is customized in it’s assembly and you are assaulted with the French fry experience. Assaulted? By French fries? Experience? To the uninitiated. You can pay less to get a hamburger at almost every other fast food joint in town. But then you are not vacuumed into the experience of a Five Guys . . . “burger and fries” (I know the rhyming is too much). The added price is worth the price of admittance. There on the wall is the
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Your Satisfied Customers are Killing Your Business
Sales management is not enough anymore. The profitable businessperson needs to understand the discipline of producing a customer experience, just like a Steven Spielberg or a Disney. This is a battle of the Baskin & Robins ice cream cone versus the pageantry of a Cold Stone Creamery.
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The incision is healing.
Who cares if you can type 80+ wpm if you hands are hurting? Carpal Tunnel. I went in for the procedure on my drawing hand. Scary stuff if you make your living with magic markers and a lot of Strategic Planning. The interesting part is the Thank You Note that came in the mail last week from my operation room nurses and support staff. Can you imagine that? A thank you note for my business. Hospitals are looking down the throat of a coming judgment day that goes by the initials of HCAHPS. This is a fancy way of saying
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What happens when you charge for free things
Can it be that simple? That the customer feels certain resentment about a $1.00 charge for air when the competitor is free. That the customer FEELS like they are being nickel and dimed. (Which would not be hard to do with the price per gallon of gas). When all things are equal, is there an attitude that shifts the customer’s loyalty when customer FEELS like they are being taken?
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Do you know how much fun chocolate is?
There is the science of this brown stuff. Chocolate contains all these awesome chemicals. Phenylalaine elevates mood and increases amiability and helps the brain manufacture serotonin . . . which is linked to mood stability. Beside the small amount of caffeine, chocolate also contains theobromine which makes the nervous system more alert and improves concentration. For decades, Hershey had a business of extracting theobromine from their discarded cocoa bean shells and selling this compound to Coca-Cola, who then put this powerful chemical in their soft drinks to add pep. This continued until the 1950’s, when Coke found a less expensive
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Minus 36 degrees . . .Cookstoves . . .Carrott . . . How to make email and voicemail that connects.
Research shows that 80% of all interaction in the workplace is done with you communicating with some sort of technology. Voice mail, email, etc. So how do you “get through?” I arrived to 36 degrees below zero temperatures. When it I got up the next morning and started the car, the transmission was frozen. I had to let the car sit in idle for 15 minutes before it worked. Canada in March. The coldest cold in my life. I was there for a series of presentations over three days in various Alberta and Saskatchewan cities. And then there was the
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Bionic Bob goes quack quack quack
I am sitting in a meeting room with my friend Bob Cannon. The quiet of the room is interrupted by the load quacking of a duck. Since the library bumps up against a park with a stream, my first thought was, “what window is open?” Looking across the table I watch Bob smack his chest and say, “Hello, this is Bob.” I thought, “what the heck is he doing?” I sat amazed as he acted as if he were on the phone with someone, sitting there, grinning at me. Next I thought, “hey, my friend is getting old, just humor
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Say Less, Sell More
The need to ask more questions, be more conversational to connect with customers.
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