Tag Archives: Colin Shaw

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experience, Part 3: Design

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How do you build great Guest Experiences?

Great [Guest] Experiences are consistent, captivating, and memorable by design. To achieve this, organizations must seize and retain their Guests’ complete attention by deliberately planning a defined Guest Experience that stimulates Guest senses and deeply engages them emotionally. – Colin Shaw, Revolutionize Your Customer Experience  (modified)

It is relatively easy for a church to provide a great Guest Experience occasionally.  But in order to create a WOW! Guest Experience, it is vital that you do this every time.

The only way to achieve a consistently great Guest Experience is if the experiences are designed.

To design something means that it is deliberate, not an accident or luck. Deliberate is a strong, proactive word. Stop and ask yourself these questions:

  • Is my Guest Experience process deliberate?
  • Did I deliberately set out to create and deliver a WOW! Guest Experience?
  • Is the outcome of the Guest Experience one that I have proactively designed?

From my observation and research in churches of all sizes across the country, in most cases the Guest Experience is not deliberate – it is something that just happens.

If you will reread Colin Shaw’s definition above, you should be able to answer the following questions about your church’s Guest Experiences.

What is the Guest Experience I am trying to deliver? Do you know? Does your team know? If I came onto your campus and asked your team “What is the Guest Experience you are trying to deliver every weekend?” would they be able to tell me? Would I get a consistent answer? Since emotions account for over half of a Guest Experience, a necessary follow-up questions is:

What are the emotions you are trying to evoke? Without considering what emotions you are trying to evoke, your Guest Experience can’t be deliberate.  According to a study done by an Australian consumer psychologist, emotions range from the top end (people are appreciated, happy, contented, delighted, and valued) to a middle range (people are indifferent or emotionless) to the bottom (people are disappointed, frustrated, neglected, annoyed, or insulted). If you are going to evoke top-level emotions, then a third question comes next:

What senses are you going to use to evoke these emotions and how are your going to do this? Human beings take in information through their 5 senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In our daily lives we use our senses to gather data about he world around us. If a Guest Experience is about the senses that are being stimulated, creating a Great Guest Experience means we define how and when to engage these senses and create a deliberate sensory impact and memory.

Creating a Guest Experience that is defined, deliberate, and designed is a key to delivering a WOW! Guest Experience every time.

 

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was inspired by and adapted from Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, founder of Beyond Philosophy.

Revolutionize Your Customer Experience

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The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 2: Purpose

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What is the purpose of Guest Experiences?

While researching Customer Experience best practices a few months ago, I came across Beyond Philosophy, a company that helps organizations create deliberate, emotionally engaging customer experiences that drive value, reduce costs, and build competitive advantage. Based in London with an office in Atlanta, Beyond Philosophy specializes in strategic consultancy services, custom research, training and education.

Steven Walden, Senior Head of Research and Consulting, was kind enough to engage me in a conversation via email and phone when I contacted the firm about my work in translating corporate Customer Experiences to ChurchWorld Guest Services.

According to Beyond Philosophy, there are 3 guiding principles of Customer Experience. I looked at the first one yesterday; today it’s time to look at the purpose of Customer Experience:

  1. Create an interaction between an organization and an individual.
  2. Conduct a transaction between an organization and an individual.
  3. Create a desire for future interactions and transactions.
  4. Create value.
  5. Create advocates.

Translation for ChurchWorld

As referenced in yesterday’s post and the Guest Experience definition, the first purpose of Guest Experience is to create an interaction. This means there is communication between the organization and the individual. Ideally, this interaction moves on to conducting a transaction. In the case of ChurchWorld, this is not a transaction involving money, but one of time and potential life change. At the same time, the organization should be looking to create a desire within Guests for future interactions and transactions. Guests will only come back if they perceive value in the interaction. Also, the organization has to see value in this interaction for it to continue to offer it. Finally, the Guest Experience should be such that the individual wants to tell others how great it was. This can happen over a few hours, days, or possibly weeks.

Putting this all together, ideally, this is what you want Guests to say when they are talking with their friends:

It was awesome! The church was easy to find following the directions on their website. Everyone made me feel welcome without being in my face, my children loved their time in their group, and the worship experience was amazing. There’s something special happening there, and I’ve got to go back again! Would you want to come with me?

In a nutshell, this is the purpose of a Guest Experience as translated from the ideas and concepts of Beyond Philosophy’s work in the arena of Customer Experience.

The first Guiding Principle deconstructed Guest Experiences by looking at a definition in detail. The second principle examined the purposes of Guest Experiences. Tomorrow, it’s time to reconstruct your Guest Experience.

 

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was inspired by and adapted from Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw.

Revolutionize Your Customer Experience

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 1: Definition

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What is a Guest Experience?

A Guest Experience is an interaction between an organization and a Guest. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated, and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against Guest expectations across all memorable moments of contact.    – Beyond Philosophy (modified)

Let’s break this definition down:

Interaction – when an interaction takes place, you are communicating. The interaction can be a split second, as when a Guest is looking at your website or print materials. It can also span a period of weeks, as the Guest continues to explore your organization at increasingly deeper levels. In an interaction, you are trying to attract attention and convey a message, hoping to receive a message in return and process it. The longer you hold your Guest’s attention, the more likely your message will get across.

Guest – an individual who is experiencing your organization for the first time, or at least is still very uncertain about moving any deeper with you. Taken to the next level, a Guest can also be an existing individual who is in your circle of influence, but not committed to become a part of the organization.

Blend – a Guest Experience is not just the physical, or just the emotional, or just the senses; it is all of these blended together.

Physical Performance – factors such as location, facilities, phone calls, digital experiences, quality of services provided, etc. While a business might consider this the end of their experience, for the church this is just the beginning; emotions and senses play a huge part in delivering Guest Experiences

Senses – human beings take in information by or senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.  In our day-to-day existence we use our senses to gather data about the world around us. Therefore, a Guest Experience is about the senses that are being stimulated. Organizations, to a large extent, can control what senses to stimulate, and this is the goal: to define how and when to deploy senses in your Guest Experience.

Emotions – the combination of physical aspects, the data received by your senses, and your expectations all contribute to evoke emotions.  Forward-thinking organizations understand more than half the Guest Experience is about evoking emotions, and then plan how to evoke specific emotions.

Expectations – when you wrap all the preceding together, your Guest develops expectations. Their perception is reality, framed by the past and hoped for the future. Everything feeds our expectations, which are constantly being updated or confirmed.

Intuitively – these expectations are measured intuitively; they are within your Guest. One person’s shyness is another person’s exuberance.  My definition of “loud” is probably different from yours. We all have personal measurement yardsticks within us.

Across all moments of contact – your guest can (and will ) touch your organization in many ways before they physically present themselves at your place. Through the web, direct mail or other print information, talking to a neighbor, etc. All of these are moments of contact that are Guest Experiences in their own right while together making up a complete Guest Experience.

As you see, there is a great deal behind the simple question, “What is a Guest Experience?”

Understanding more about what a Guest Experience is begs the next question:

Why bother?

I thought you’d never ask…

Tomorrow: Purpose

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was inspired by and adapted from Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw.

Revolutionize Your Customer Experience

Are the Guest Experiences a “Natural” in Your Church?

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Part 4 of a 4-part series exploring Beyond Philosophy’s Customer Experience Orientation, as applied to Guest Experiences in Church World

Natural Orientation – a church where focus on the Guest is total. It is very proactive and is naturally focused on the complete Guest Experience. In order to produce memorable and captivating Guest Experiences it uses specific senses to evoke planned emotions. Research shows that only about 2% of organizations exhibit a Natural Orientation.

In this orientation, the Guest Experience is in the church’s DNA. It does not have to consider what to do as it does it naturally. It understands the critical role that senses play and had deliberately built these into its guest Experience. It understands that Guests have sensory expectations and then uses the senses to creae captivating and memorable experiences. It involve the Guest in the design of the Guest Experience and has defined its own Guest Experience “recipe.” It is totally proactive to Guest demands and undertakes many activities, which event the Guest does not see, to build a great Guest Experience.

The Natural oriented church recognizes the amazing power of “stories” and “storytelling,” both inside the organization and outside, and it uses these to great effect to build its unique Guest Experience. Its leadership, and everyone in the organization, has been selected to meet its deliberate Guest Experience.

The culture of a Natural oriented church is aligned to the Guest Experience and is seen as an enabling tool. It uses theater as a method of producing consistency of its Guest Experiences. It has aligned the brand and its Guest Experience and one supports the other. It has very sophisticated methods of collecting Guest data, which it constantly uses to improve its Guest Experience.

Natural churches are masters of details. Each part of the Natural church has a measured focus on achieving the Guest Experience, and these include measurement of emotions and senses. The high-level journey of a Guest has been plotted into an experience map and the sublevels have also been defined. For the Natural church, details matter.

Traits of a Natural church:

  • Complete focus on the Guest
  • Focuses so much of the Guest Experience that it is in the church’s DNA
  • Deliberate Guest Experience and a clearly defined Guest Experience Statement
  • System built to improve the Guest Experience
  • Culture that is designed and aligned to the Guest Experience
  • Focused on depth of emotion
  • Consciously uses senses to provide a captivating experience
  • Recruits people who are good at acting
  • Integrated approach to the Guest
  • Understands Guest sensory expectations

For more information on this subject, check out Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, pp. 20-21; 148-160

You can also find more information at Beyond Philosophy’s website.

 

Here’s a recap of the previous orientations:

Now that you understand more about the four possible orientations of your church’s Guest Experience, what actions are you going to take? What are the obstacles in your way? How are you going to embed the changes needed in your organization?

Have You Achieved Enlightenment in Your Church’s Guest Experience?

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Part 3 of a 4-part series exploring Beyond Philosophy’s Customer Experience Orientation, as applied to Guest Experiences in Church World

Enlightened Orientation – a church that has recognized the need for a holistic, coordinated, and deliberate approach to the Guest Experience. It is proactive in nature towards the Guest and orchestrates emotionally engaging Guest Experiences. It stimulates planned emotions. Research shows that approximately 22% of organizations exhibit an Enlightened Orientation.

The Enlightened church understands the importance of the Guest Experience and has thus achieved enlightenment. It has converted from being reactive to proactive to Guest demands. It has understood the critical nature of defining the Guest Experience it is trying to deliver. It has spent time discussing it at the senior team level and agreed on a Guest Experience statement which has been communicated to all team members. It realizes that over 50% of every Guest Experience is about emotions and therefore has embedded new processes into its Guest Experience, which are planned to deliberately evoke emotions. Enlightened churches recognize that Guests have emotional expectations, as well as physical expectations, and plan to exceed both.

The Enlightened church has formal methods to ensure that people spend time with the Guest. This applies from the most senior team leaders all the way through the organization. The leadership walks the talk and sets the standards regarding the Guest Experience.

The Enlightened church has taken actions to coordinate and align its Guest Experience. Typically, it has established a high-level leadership position (paid staff or volunteer) along with dedicated team leaders. It also seeks out team members who have an awareness of and demonstrated use of emotional capabilities. The Enlightened church has recognized that an organization’s culture impacts the Guest Experience.

There are a number of key things that change over at the crossover point from Transactional to Enlightened. A number of these are attitudinal, from reactive to proactive, from “inside out” to “outside in,” and from physical to “physical and emotions.”

The Enlightened church knows what emotions it is evoking at each stage of its interaction with a Guest. It has spent time in defining the emotion it wants to evoke, and it has planned these into the design of the Guest Experience.

An Enlightened church has a different attitude to the Guest from the Naïve or Transactional church. The Guest is very much in the lifeblood of the Enlightened church. It does things for the Guest without a second thought. It intuitively knows what to do.

What does an Enlightened church need to do to Revolutionize Their Guest Experience?

  • Consider the senses they are going to use
  • Build senses into the Guest journey mapping
  • Define how they are going to stimulate the senses
  • Look at using theater and entertainment as a method for providing a great Guest Experience
  • Provide training in acting techniques
  • Understand Guest sensory expectations
  • Gain real alignment of the people, the culture, and the Guest Experience
  • Look to create captivating and memorable Guest Experiences
  • Review processes regularly
  • Involve the Guest in designing

Next time: The Natural Orientation

 

For more information on this subject, check out Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, pp. 19-20; 127-147

You can also find more information at Beyond Philosophy’s website.

Are Your Church’s Guest Experiences Transactional in Nature?

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Part 2 of a 4-part series exploring Beyond Philosophy’s Customer Experience Orientation, as applied to Guest Experiences in Church World 

Transactional Orientation – a church that focuses primarily on the physical aspects of the Guest Experience. It has recognized the importance of the Guest. However, its focus is rudimentary, as many aspects of the Guest Experience remain left to chance and are uncoordinated and “inside out.” Research indicates that approximately 67% of organizations exhibit a Transactional Orientation.

The Transactional oriented church understands some of the basics of the Guest Experience but still remains quite reactive to Guest demands. If has recognized that the Guest is quite important and it has made some changes to reflect this. The core of its operation is primarily around the physical aspects of Guest Experiences: a few special parking spots, maybe a welcome area, a few people greeting everyone. It is, in reality, still “inside out” and its Guest Experience is not deliberate, but just happens.

Organizationally, the Transactional church is often functionally siloed, with each silo treating the Guest in a different manner. Little information is shared across functions and Guests are forced into dealing with many different parts of the organization.

Typically, the senior leadership team in a Transactional church claims they are Guest focused but the words and deeds do not match. This contradiction is seen by team members throughout the organization – who then mimic the behavior.

Good intentions are no substitute for action; failure usually follows the path of least persistence.  – Anonymous

In the Transactional Church the brand and the actual Guest Experience are not aligned. “The Friendliest Church in Town” usually isn’t. A great deal of time is spent by the Transactional Church in building its brand image, but it has not gone that critical one stage further and defined how it will manifest itself in the Guest Experience.

The core of the Transactional church remains “inside out.” These churches do think Guests are important, which is a marked improvement from the Naïve church. However, they believe the Guest is still not as important as the organization is. Transactional churches remain primarily physically based and do not look at the emotions they should be evoking.

What does a Transactional church need to do to Revolutionize Their Guest Experience?

  • Understand that emotions play a key role in the Guest Experience
  • Start to enlist people with emotional awareness
  • Review processes so that they evoke the right emotions
  • Implement cross-silo communications to give a complete Guest view
  • Understand the importance of team member’s well being
  • Define the Guest Experience
  • Align the Guest Experience throughout the organization
  • Look at Guest’s emotional expectations
  • Build an overall Guest journey
  • Increase the time the senior leadership team spends with Guests

Next time: The Enlightened Orientation

 

For more information on this subject, check out Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, pp. 19; 108-125.

You can also find more information at Beyond Philosophy’s website.

Are You Providing a Naive Orientation in Your Church’s Guest Experience?

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Part 1 of a 4-part series exploring Beyond Philosophy’s Customer Experience Orientation, as applied to Guest Experiences in ChurchWorld. 

Naïve Orientation – a church that focuses on itself to the detriment of the Guest. It is “inside-out” either through choice or because it doesn’t know what it should be doing. Research indicates approximately 9% of organizations exhibit a Naïve orientation.

Naïve churches focus on themselves rather than the Guest Experience. They are reactive to Guest demands. They believe their programs or processes are more important than the Guest. Their attitude with the Guest is one of “Take it or leave it.” Their processes are totally focused “inside out,” doing things for the benefit of members, rather than “outside in,” which is changing the church to meet Guests’ requirements.

The Naïve oriented church is typically a siloed organization and struggles between the silos is rife.

Churches are in this orientation either because they are:

  • Unaware what they should be doing to build a great Guest Experience. They are not deliberately trying to cause a poor Guest Experience; it is simply that they do not know what they do not know. They are unaware of the impact their actions have on their Guest Experience. By definition they have not spent time thinking through the implications of what they are doing. This typically indicates they believe something else is more important than Guest Experience. Typically, this is taking care of members’ needs first and foremost.
  • Aware of their orientation but simply don’t care as Guests are a nuisance, and seen as a means to an end.
  • In this orientation “by default.” This means the church knows is should be focused on the experience it gives its Guests but something else always gets in the way. Something else is deemed more important.

If a Guest Experience is provided at all by Naïve churches, it is entirely physical. They have either failed to realize that they are evoking emotions (usually negative) or don’t care that they are.

Naïve churches do not consider the Guest. Nearly all of their processes are designed on the basis of what is good and convenient for the church. This means the Guest has to fit around them.  This “inside out” behavior shows apathy at best towards Guests and disdain at worst.

In Naïve churches almost 100% of all measurement is around the internal functioning of the church, with almost no Guest measures. Only the physical aspects of the Guest Experience are measured by many Naïve churches, leaving emotions and senses unrecognized.

If you were to look at a Naïve church’s organizational structure, it would be focused around program or ministry groups. Meeting agendas typically have no mention of the Guest on the agenda.

What does a Naïve church need to do to Revolutionize Their Guest Experience?

  • Change their attitude to Guests
  • Put themselves in the Guest’s shoes and see what it feels like
  • Realize that emotions account for over half the Guest Experience
  • Define the Guest Experience they want to deliver
  • Move from reactive to proactive
  • Understand all the elements that ultimately affect the Guest Experience
  • Define a plan on how to move forward
  • Look at all Guest Touch Points and define where the biggest problems are
  • Treat your team members well

Next time: The Transactional Orientation

For more information on this subject, check out Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, pp. 18-19; 91-107.

You can also find more information at Beyond Philosophy’s website.

What is Your Guest Experience Orientation?

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We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.   – Albert Einstein

Ongoing research by the customer experience group Beyond Philosophy has led to the discovery of a previously unidentified trend on how an organization is “oriented” around the customer to enable it to deliver a Great Customer experience.

To represent this discovery, Beyond Philosophy devised a groundbreaking model that enables organizations to understand where they are, and what they need to do to deliver a great Customer Experience. If the organization recognizes its current position it can clearly understand what it needs to do to “Revolutionize Its Customer Experience.”

Graphically, the model looks like this:

Their research shows there are four distinct orientations organizations go through on their journey to enable them to deliver a great Customer Experience. They call this the Journey from Naïve to Natural.

The four orientations and a brief definition of each are as follows:

  • Naïve – an organization that focuses on itself to the detriment of the customer. It is “inside out” either through choice or because it doesn’t know what it should be doing.
  • Transactional – an organization that focuses primarily on the physical aspects of the customer experience. While it recognizes the importance of the customer, many aspects of the customer experience are left to chance and are uncoordinated or “inside out.”
  • Enlightened – an organization that has recognized the need for a holistic, coordinated, and deliberate approach to the customer experience. It is proactive in nature towards the customer and stimulates planned emotions.
  • Natural – an organization where focus on the customer is total. It is very proactive and is naturally focused on the complete customer experience. It uses specific senses to evoke planned emotions.

Their research also showed that organizations are distributed across the four orientations in the following percentages:

Naïve – 9%

Transactional – 67%

Enlightened – 22%

Natural – 2%

Why is this important to church leaders? The four orientations define how organizations are centered or oriented. It’s another way of talking about how your church is oriented to deliver a great Guest Experience.

How does this translate to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld?

The first step in delivering WOW! Guest Experiences is knowing where you are now. By answering the Where are we? question first, you will be in good shape to understand Why you are there, and What you need to do to move forward.

Tomorrow’s post will begin a 4-part series taking a closer look at each of these orientations, with specific application to Guest Experience in churches – like yours.

The Power of Story in Guest Experience

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Stories can be very engaging. We fill our lives with stories. When we tell our friends what happened on our vacation, what we say to our coworkers after the big meeting, talk about our kids’ activities, what happened at the grocery store, we are storytelling. Stories are powerful methods of communication.

The concept of “story” is coming together for me in several areas of my life. While doing research for a work project, I read the following by Robert McKee in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

Stories fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living – not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.

The last phrase of McKee’s quote reminded me of the importance that emotion plays in a Guest Experience. Extending that thought, the power of stories and anecdotes should not be underestimated as you consider how you might weave them into the design of your Guest Experience.

The power of stories is very captivating. When you are sitting down and watching a good movie you can become captivated (in the same way discussed here). Movies and theatre are just stories in another form. What’s your favorite film? You can probably recite the story line in great detail. As you are doing that, you can even remember how you felt when you were watching it. The movie captivated you, you were laughing and crying with the characters – you were the character, you were in the film.

You feel the emotion they do. People talk about being “on the edge of their seats.” Movies evoke emotions in powerful ways. Recently, a group of friends, my wife, and I saw the movie “Argo,” based on the true story of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Since all of us are about the same age, we were young adults in our early 20s when the story was news, not a movie. In a discussion following the movie, everyone could recall what they saw and felt and talked about during those tense times. The movie took us back over 30 years to bring back memories that were vivid.

That is the power of story – it is an experience that enables us to escape to another world, to be captivated and be in the moment.

So ask yourself this:

What are the stories that your Guests would tell about you?

Remember that those great movies that you remember every detail about don’t just happen. They are planned and scripted. In the same way, organizations that aspire to WOW! Guest Experiences spend hours planning that Guest Experience. Every detail is considered and the senses are used to evoke emotions. In the same way a movie uses music, a tender love scene, and great dialogue to evoke emotions in the viewer, you must use the same principles to create a great Guest Experience.

Over the last few weeks I have been referring a lot to the work of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading experts on customer experience. In conversations with their staff and in researching their great resources, I have been able to “translate” the world of corporate customer experience to that of Guest Experiences in ChurchWorld.

In Beyond Philosophy founder Colin Shaw’s book Revolutionize Your Customer Experience, expert storyteller and story coach Doug Stevenson tells of the power of story. I have modified the language to that of Guest Experience:

For a Guest Experience to come alive and captivate an audience, the content, structure, and performance must be crafted strategically. The Guest Experience itself is only a beginning. Guest Experience is an art and the designer of the Guest Experience, the artist. And all artists need tools. The actor needs a stage, props, and costumes. The musician needs her instrument. The artist needs his brushes and paint. And the Guest Experience designer needs form, content, and presentation skills and techniques. The great designers of Guest Experiences distinguish themselves not just by their talent, but also by their dedication to their craft. They think about their Guest Experiences constantly. They structure the sequence and flow of the Guest Experience, and experiment to find the right words that are genuinely theirs. They work on a gesture or movement until it is just right. Then they rehearse if over and over again until it becomes second nature – the line and the gesture effortlessly married together. The incorporate acting skills and turn their Guest Experiences into little theatrical events. In order to have an end result that is amazing, you will have to spend many hours working on your Guest Experience. Your Guest Experience must be worked and re-worked, formed and re-formed. You’ll want to find the drama and comedy of your Guest Experience and let them shine.

Can you see that stories are essential enablers of the Guest Experience?

What is Your Share of Your Guest’s Mind during a Guest Experience?

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Beyond Philosophy has created some great ideas and tools for understanding customer experience in the corporate world. In their book Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, the concept of Share Your MindTM is introduced.

Beyond Philosophy discovered that there are four different levels of customer attention:

  • Oblivious
  • Distracted
  • Engaged
  • Captivated

Graphically it looks like this (modified to reflect Guest language):

Oblivious Guest Experiences

There are many organizations that try to grab your attention as a consumer – even in ChurchWorld – and yet you are oblivious to their advances. You haven’t seen their billboards, direct mail pieces, signs, bulletins, newsletters, worship guides, etc. You are exposed to thousands of “messages” every day, and yet you ignore most of them. Giving someone an oblivious Guest Experience costs organizations – like your church – a lot of money for nothing in return.

Distracted Guest Experiences

When you are distracted, you are not focused on the Guest Experience. For instance, a Guest may come to your church and wander around, thinking about other things. A greeter does not engage them. They do not see a special opportunity coming in two weeks. They aren’t challenged to take the next step. If you are not careful, they will slip in, be a spectator, and slip right out again. When this happens, organizations have not captivated or engaged the mind of the Guest, and they are distracted and indifferent enough to not pay attention to the Guest Experience being provided. Organizations that allow their Guest’s mind to wander and be distracted are losing a massive opportunity to build on future interactions.

Engaged Guest Experience

In the engaged stage you have 95 percent of your Guests’ attention, but it is not captivating, and therefore Guests can easily be distracted. There is a danger that their minds may wander and you may lost an opportunity to connect with them. For example, if your organization has wonderful connection points and eager people but not alignment of purpose, it would be easy for a Guest to lose their overall connection curiosity because they are literally inundated with messages. They may be engaged, but are eventually lost in an overwhelming amount of information or they find something else that pulls them away.

Captivating Guest Experiences

The goal is to create a captivating Guest Experience by capturing your Guest’s whole mind and thus ensure they give you their full and undivided attention. It is the stimulating of their senses to such a degree that positive emotions are evoked, rendering them captivated. Nothing stops them from focusing on your Guest Experience, and more importantly, nothing can distract them from it. They are so engrossed in your Guest Experience that nothing will pull them away from it. Your “share of mind”TM is total.

Captivating Guest Experiences are memorable by nature. Creating a memorable Guest Experience is important when considering the culture we live in. If your Guest Experience does not stand out, your organization will blend in, becoming part of the noise and blandness of this world.

Organizations must seize Guest’s attention from the first point of contact (often digital). Organizations must stimulate Guest senses (all 5 of them) to create a captivating Guest Experience, one that will evoke deep emotions – and create a connection that will allow the possibility of a transformed life.

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was excerpted from “Revolutionize Your Customer Experience” by Colin Shaw.