Last week I had a chat with Matteo Atti. If you want disruptive, practical and pragmatic you need Matteo. We went through a lot of topics, but I want to share with you one in particular. And this is a reflection for luxury professionals.
As you know, customer experiences are designed from the guest’s perspective, not from the company perspective, it's an outside in approach, yet all our processes are designed to solve our problems, and not the needs of the guests.
Say the check in, while talking to Matteo we really delved into the question of whether we need or not a check in. Really, which guest out there likes the check in process? Is like we are on a mission to make the experience unpleasant and uncomfortable. I couldn’t agree more with Matteo: Why do we need to make the check in into a moment? How can we hide it? Doing it better is still not enough, the process is still torture.
Now you might be thinking should we then use technology? and I'm not here to answer that question, but do you really want self-service in luxury?
Well this kind of approach is not only about check in.... When I start a design process with a client the first thing I do is to audit the existing experience. That is, going through every touch point, and among all the things I look at, I also go ahead to understanding why is that process there, what is the reason and logic behind it and if its relevant for the guest or not. Next, I ask who is that process helping, the guest or the company? And we go one by one understanding the flow. Once that is done, we mark all the touchpoints in the journey that are transactions, meaning all those moments that are not of delight and value for our guests, but transactions that solve our internal needs and problems. You will be shocked to realize how many transactions you put your customer through on a single customer journey.
So, I invite you to do this audit. Go through your experience with a fresh set of eyes, look at it from the guest perspective from the first time… it will be difficult, but you need it. And when you highlight every transaction that is there for you but doesn’t add value to the guest find a way to hide it, replace it, rethink it…. your team will be your biggest asset and ally to innovate.
Cause just like the check in, do you really need to make all of those transactions into moments?
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