6. Products As Portals
Products as portals to experiences that matter to customers—designing a great experience with a consistent promise across multiple touch points—how you use design for customer experience supply chain management.
You are CEO of a company with 50,000 employees, and you are so dedicated to the concept of customer experience driving the quality and value of your household products that in 1985, when a line of your company’s refrigerators were found to be defective, you had the workers who’d made them line up and smash 76 of them to smithereens. Hell, you grabbed a sledgehammer and smashed away at one of the damned things yourself. The public smashing of products that don’t make the cut appears to be somewhat de rigueur for Pacific Rim companies. You have been recognized by Financial Times as a turnaround specialist, and your company’s brand philosophy is "Be brand the sail, be customer the teacher." Well, your intentions are good.
So what happens when you go on the Internet to a site, www1.shopping.com,[18] and you look at 25 reviews of a product you released, a Haier XQG65-11SU Front Load All-in-One Washer/Dryer, and the reviews read:
© Stan Musilek
- Worst product, worst experience ever! Do not ever buy a Haier product.
- I’m a lemon. Do not buy this or any Haier washer/dryer combo unit.
- CUSTOMER SERVICE STINKS!
- Badly engineered, unreliable.
- The poor quality is mind-boggling. A piece of junk.
This goes on and on like this, until, if you’re on a plane, you reach for the barf bag. Your name is Zhang Ruimin, chairman and chief executive officer of Haier, and you’re not having your best day. You reach for your cell phone and start seeing what you can do about damage control.
All around the globe there are well-intentioned CEOs like Zhang Ruimin who do everything they can to seek excellence and drive that by listening to customers. You can talk the talk and seek to walk the walk, but the bigger your company is, the harder it is to ensure that every single thing goes according to plan. Therein lies the rub.
You live and die based on the emotions of customer experience, but once they grab the torches and pitchforks and begin to storm the castle, all your products are imperiled. If you are Zhang Ruimin, you hope you can put out this brushfire before it spreads. You have other products where the reviews are much better. Just how much has this one mess prejudiced the buying public?
As noted before, the consumer horde can be somewhat forgiving if a brand it has grown to trust stumbles now and again. But, as with Tylenol or, in this case, Haier, quick and healing action is vital if you are to smooth the overall sense of customer experience as it relates to your product. In a larger sense, it is the task of any company that wants to be truly design-driven to watch the customer experience meter as if it is the barometer of your survival, and in many cases it is.
How do you let customer experience drive and permeate every aspect of your total company and all products or services, no matter how big or small your company might be? That is what we intend to explore.
Starting with Experience, Hopefully Ending with It
Richard Branson, Virgin Airlines, says, "I started an airline because the experience of flying on other airlines was such a miserable experience."
The driving force behind the design idea of the inception of many companies had to do with customer experience. Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera after his daughter asked, "Why can’t we look at the pictures right away?" The idea was good, at first. More than fifty years later, it could well have been made into a song to play at Polaroid’s funeral, with the photos being taken with digital (instant) cameras.
Getting how important experience is, and keeping that notion, is as vital to doing business for a design driven company as anything you can grasp. Sometimes you can orchestrate everything to go your way. Other times you might need to go at the mission like riding a bucking bronco. The choice is up to you to do as much as you can up front, and that’s not so easy or PCWorld wouldn’t have a list of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of all Time."[19]
When the public is sorting through the good, the bad, and the ugly of products or services, you know where you want to be. But how can you ensure you don’t stumble? Well, the fact is there is no one person or company with a perfect record in everything. There are examples, though, where there is a consistent aim to use customer experience to drive the design of products or services, and though focus groups and research are often used, they aren’t as effective as getting and staying on a gut-on-gut basis with customers.
Although not easy to do, at the same time not as hard as you might think, because we all have our own personal experience as a touchstone. There is a silly line in the old but still funny classic movie Caddyshack where Chevy Chase gives golf advice by chanting the mantra: "Be the ball. Be the ball." Well, it’s not so silly when you start aiming to "Be the customer. Be the customer." That’s certainly how Steve Jobs is thinking when he is muttering, "Hey, I can’t use these damned buttons." Or, "I can’t read from this screen. We need to fix that." You need to know your customer. Jobs knows his very well and stays focused on this. The Apple customer is narrow, but aspirational. It is why the iPod crossed over and you see members of the older generations with iPods.
But even Steve Jobs, or any person or company mentioned in this book, must keep fresh with that—constantly relearn and reapply and reexperience the world of the customer or take the fall from good to bad or ugly. It’s a constant, living approach for a business, and that’s why it’s a chore to get there, or stay there. You can do this. CEO or not, the power of one person to make a difference is real.
Being the Customer
Take a company like THX. If you have been in a movie theater anytime lately, you have felt the company’s signature sound dopple in one of your ears through your head and out the other side. What a nice way to "show" how they work too, instead of just "tell." The company does more than just certify the sound in theaters. As CE Pro put it, "If there’s one electronics logo that consumers across the world recognize, it’s THX. They see it on their favorite DVDs, electronic equipment, and even video games."[20] When the company is mentioned in relation to a product or venue, you expect a good experience. In a quite Pavlovian way, you are drooling for a rich sound happening.
The company began in the early 1980s when George Lucas was not happy with the consistency of sound in theaters. He was working on the third of his Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, and had put a lot of effort into the special effects, including sound, and didn’t want that work to be wasted. Stop and think about that for the moment. He’s a filmmaker, who should just be making movies, but he is motivated by having endured in a theater or two where he had a crappy audio experience, so he gets involved all the way to the delivery level of his product to the public.
THX was developed by Tomlinson Holman at the Lucasfilm company site, and THX, Ltd. (www.thx.com) has not rested on its initial laurel. The THX II Certified Car Audio System was recognized as one of the Best Car Audio Systems of 2006 by the editors of CNET. The company is expanding to home video systems and training programs, and in every instance, it begins with sitting down in the customer’s chair and getting inside that customer’s head.
Follow this sequence: THX started with the idea of ensuring moviegoers with a terrific auditory experience. They built the brand within theater promotional spots placed before the main feature. As people began to connect the brand to the pleasure of great sound, THX started making the experience portable, out of theaters into homes and cars by way of THX certified components, including headphones. The brand is now perceived by people as a portal to a more rewarding entertainment experience.
How Do You Do This?
Let’s say you start with a personal experience you think could be improved, made current, or even approached from a different direction and you say, "We’re going to design a superior customer experience; that’s the starting point." Then you design an organization to design the product or service and deliver the experience. That’s what Cirque du Soleil did.
It’s what Alice Waters did when she got the idea for Chez Panisse, which has been rated the #1 restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine and consistently stays near the top of their list. She was nominated as one of the ten most important people in food by the French, and she’s American. It all started for her when, as a student at U.C. Berkeley, she spent a year abroad and got immersed in the culture of Paris and Provence. There she came to understand how food is really about the experience of the community gathered around the table, and that while the food should at least be good, the experience extends from the local growers, enhanced by culinary skills to the pleasures of the table and good companionship. In this tradition, you couldn’t say "what’s for dinner" until you discovered what was available fresh that day when you went to market. That became the experience Alice wanted to consistently offer through her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which opened its doors in 1971. How has this worked out? Almost four decades of brilliance to date.
That was how Howard Schultz’s head was working when he visited Milan and said, "This is an experience coffee customers would be willing to pay a little more to share." Both Alice Waters and Howard Schultz were CEOs of their companies in the sense that they were chief experience officers in the conception of their businesses. Schultz arrived at the Starbucks experience. How brilliant was that? Well, in retrospect it seems one of those things that’s incredibly obvious, but what a few other people probably realized, namely that the coffee shop was about more than getting coffee, Schultz and Starbucks implemented brilliantly. Schultz didn’t think he was in the coffee business, he was in the experience business, and the portal into that experience was a better cup of coffee in a carefully designed atmosphere. We are reminded of our favorite Mae West line here; "I used to be Snow White and then I drifted." Starbucks has drifted. It remains to be seen if they can rebuild the experience and survive commoditization.
Portals to Experience
In the Harry Potter books and movies, there are magical ways to get around for wizards, and one is by way of a portal. If you touch it, you are whisked away to a far-away place; the other end of the connection. That’s how really well-designed products or services work: The product becomes an icon and a venue, a doorway or a portal for a specific community to a unique experience, and that’s where you start to create equity.
Even a thing like a book is a portal. Don’t think of this thing you hold in your hands as a product. Look at it as a portal. If it is a success at sharing the importance of valuing customer experience and using that as you design your organization (even if that’s you at home in your pajamas as you launch your startup) and products or services, then it has swept you through and on to a better place.
A product or service can equally be the portal to a negative customer experience. If your knees are jammed into your face and the flight attendant is carrying some serious attitude and if you’re late and miss a connection and making a new one is a huge hassle, and then your luggage turns up missing and customer service is an oxymoron, then you have not been flying Southwest or Virgin—you’ve been flying a legacy airline. Well, let’s be fair—being a legacy airline in the current environment is an extraordinarily challenging place to be. And any airline can take a pop when weather shifts or security at airports is tightened, or any number of things that can go wrong do go wrong.
But how they handle all this and keep you moving with a smile on your face nevertheless all comes down to whether their airline has been sustained as a portal to a good experience or has drifted to become a gateway to misery and frustration. It all loops back to: "Do they start with how a customer feels?" You can retain the services of one of the world’s great design firms (United did this), but if this is approached as a bolt on retrofit, like new overhead bins in an aging fleet, then all that happens is that misery gets to be better looking.
Do they design the customer experience supply chain so you don’t end up with a grumpy flight attendant (this alone requires a carrier to relate to their people as if they were also customers—because airline crews want what the traveling public wants—a good experience) or seating that has ergonomically sacrificed your ability to ever walk upright again. Do they coordinate all the factors they can control toward being a positive part of your travel experience? Is everyone trained to make your flight consistently impeccable? And, if things go south because of some condition or event, are they are also prepared to make it right, quickly, and pleasantly? That doesn’t always seem to happen with some companies, while it does with others. Customers notice. You probably have noticed, and it affects your decision process the next time you are making travel plans. You find yourself skipping over some better deals on "Air Misery" to pay a bit more for an experience you can live with, maybe even enjoy.
We acknowledge that it’s hard to be United or American, for example. It is incredibly difficult for a major legacy carrier to pull off an extreme makeover. It is much easier to be Southwest or Virgin Atlantic, because you had the chance to design and build the culture from scratch to deliver the experience you wanted your chosen customers to enjoy.
Let’s talk about grilling for a moment. That a grill is a grill is a grill doesn’t hold up anymore. Not when someone has designed and built a barbeque grill expressly as a portal to the ultimate grilling experience. Enter the Fuego grill on which the food buzz is: "A beautiful grill that is being dubbed ’the iPhone of Grills.’ This sure beats our 3-year-old George Foreman grill that resembles a first-generation iMac."[21] According to ID Magazine, "Fuego is an architectural reinvention of outdoor grilling. No mountainous hoods. No lumbering curves. Just streamlined functionality that puts modern design on the front burner."
As Sara Hart on Dwell Dailey’s Tech Blog put it:
When a ubiquitous product gets a major upgrade, its packaging should separate it from its competitors. Fuego, North America, a San Francisco-based high-end home product firm, did just that when it created the Fuego Grill, an outdoor grill unlike any other. Its sleek, compact, stainless-steel body with teak countertops says, ’"I am not your daddy’s Weber." The Quick-Change Drawer System allows the cooking method to be changed from gas to gas-fired infrared to traditional charcoal by simply swapping the drawers. It has a grill-surface temperature thermometer to gauge cooking time, and a modular system to accommodate all sorts of accessories, including a deep fryer, cast-iron griddle, wok, and steamer. The hood retracts completely out of the way. It won iF [magazine’s] 2007 Product Design Award and was a winner in ID Magazine’s 53rd Annual Design Review and most notably the 2007 IDEA Gold Medal for consumer products from BusinessWeek. The Fuego 02 is a smaller version. The larger model sells for about $3,500.[22]
Images © Stan Musilek
So, how is one barbeque grill a portal to a better experience than another? Fuego understood and started with a dialogue on the idea that the barbeque is more than a cooking appliance. It is a hub for outdoor entertaining. The realization that the most common design of the barbeque, with the big hood, was actually an impediment to socialization, because it creates a dynamic where it’s difficult to stand around, was nothing short of brilliant. Basically, with the legacy hooded grill, if you’re cooking, everybody’s behind you. You want to get into situations where you’re cooking and everyone’s around you. That was really the inspiration for the Fuego Grill, the understanding it’s about a social experience. Fuego is more than just a cool grill that works really well; it is a portal to a richer outdoor social experience in a very modern way.
This All Sounds Good, But One More Time, How Do I Go About Doing It?
To some extent, all the things we’ve been discussing might seem a product of common sense. Think like a customer and always keep that in mind. This requires an unrelenting vigilance if you are to pull it off. When you try to do something in a big company, it becomes much harder to do. It takes a lot for Steve Jobs to throw himself into iPod design and ensure that every stage, from idea to delivery to customer to follow-up, all work. It also takes a team of amazingly talented people working together with a shared commitment to change the game forever. This represents the metaphorical equivalent of Roger Banister breaking the four minute mile. Once Banister did it in May of 1954, others followed. Banister’s performance became the portal for other athletes. When you study the performance of the "Banisters of Business" focus on the ideas, do not get stuck in the weeds of so-called "best practices" because they rarely translate to another (and therefore different) organizational culture.
It is one thing for George Lucas to realize that he can make the best movies, but the experience will be diminished unless the sound in theaters is outstanding. It is a very demanding thing to design, develop, and deliver the sound dynamics of THX. Now imagine how hard it is for someone like Zhang Ruimin, our protagonist at the opening of the chapter, whose company puts out hundreds of products every year. Things can go wrong, as they did with the washer/dryer mentioned. Then you are in a state of damage control instead of progressing forward. You can’t batten down the hatches and dive, dive, dive. You’ve got to stay out there and nurture your customer base back to that level of trust that was the intended promise with each design.
Now, that was always hard enough in the past, but it is much harder today because of the media and interactivity of the internet, as Haier found out when a majority of reviewers decided to let their teeth show when chatting about their experiences with the washer/dryer. The transparency of customer experience today is far greater than it has ever been, in part because of the power and immediacy of product review by customers. Whole brands have nose-dived because of one product that was rushed to market and created problems that could not be corrected, all this in an atmosphere where products must be rushed to market. Again the moral of the story is that although you can (and must) engineer time out of the manufacturing and distribution links of the chain, taking time out of the design cycle can be risky business.
Add working quickly in an environment where customers can now bite back, along with all the other hurdles any product faces, and you have the reason that doing everything right is so important, and is so difficult. Doing it right means you work across a whole variety of organizations within and without your company. That requires a lot of alignment and focus and shared thinking. Plus you need to constantly learn and improve how you develop and implement your experience across all disciplines. Very few people in most companies have the power to ensure this happens. The CEO is usually the one who drives that, aligns the organization and suppliers and everyone else, and says, "This stuff matters. This is how we’re going to do it. You’re empowered to make this happen, and I’m going to hold you accountable and responsible for everything that leads to the eventual customer experience."
Having said that, we now live in a world where a division of a global company is often bigger than the larger companies of yesterday. This being the case, if you run a division, or you are the product manager of a line, you can apply all this stuff and who knows, you might end up transforming the whole business. As they say, "there’s nothing harder to stop than a trend." Start a trend.
The idea to embrace, understand, and implement, once you are prepared to make the leap, is that of an "experience chain" management style. This works whether you are dealing with a product or service and is not just about either of those. Customer experience supply chain management starts with the end in mind—the customer’s experience—and continues with the design of every aspect of the corporate culture and operations so as to choreograph a total design and delivery of every detail of that intended experience.
Nordstrom comes up a lot when you talk about the retail sector because the company has made an identity for itself by having good products and excellent customer experience. Rumor has it a clerk even took a tire back for a credit from a customer although the Nordstrom stores don’t sell tires. But then you know that could have happened if you’ve ever been in a Nordstrom store. If you seem to know what you’re up to and are just browsing and having a good time, you’re left alone to enjoy. But if your brow furrows, and you start glancing up the aisles, a clerk appears as if on silent feet and you get help; not everyday help, but that over-the-top-yet-gracious kind of help. You want to get a red cashmere sweater for your niece. The clerk shows you one display, then walks you across the store into another department to show you something more hip for a younger person, and it just happens to be on special. You’ve mentioned gift, so the clerk whips into a back room and reappears with your purchase wrapped in a clever, different way that is going to make your niece sure feel special. Well, for that matter, so do you.
So, how does Nordstrom do it? Do they just hire well, have an excellent training program, or what? The fact is, being the way they are is a conscious part of the big design picture from one end of the company to the other. The buyer knows it. The clerk certainly knows it. And you can go to the bank on that the CEO knows it. But isn’t this something everyone could do? Couldn’t this approach be commoditized? Well, it could, but be reminded, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
You go into a Container Store and you’ll see banners proclaiming it has been voted one of the greatest places for employees to work. Why is that important to your experience? You look around. Good stuff, but mostly just variations on the basic box. You could perhaps cobble together something like it yourself and save some money. Before you know it you’re talking with one of the employees and seeing how you can turn a closet into something able to hold twice what you can now, and with sturdy dependable components someone is ready to stand behind. So you skip the D.I.Y. box idea and buy what you need and head home to reconstruct that closet.
Contrast the Nordstrom or Container Store experience with what happens when you go into Wal-Mart. A person greets you at the door, which shows they are making the effort. The clerks are all readily identified by a blue smock that says they are eager to help you. But the body language is often wrong and you overhear grumbling. What the heck! You’re here for prices, aren’t you? You put up with a vendor rep who is so busy stocking shelves you can’t even get to a product you want, and the overhead PA system shoots you right out of your socks a couple of times, but at last you have what you came for, and you head for checkout. There are 20-item express lines that don’t look to be moving all that fast. There’s a place where you can check out your own goods (and you start thinking for an extra buck they might let you mop their floors). Then there are the usual checkout lines for people who seem to wait until everything in their house must be replaced all at once.
But here’s something. When you were coming in you looked across and saw a bob of curly yellow hair on checkout row #9. That’s Betty. You saw other people glancing to see if she was there too. When you get in that line, it is seven or eight carts long while other checkout rows only have two or three stuffed carts. But you’re fine with waiting. Everyone in your row is smiling, and many chat to each other. Folks in the other rows are frowning, and look ready to bite. You finally get up to Betty who asks how you’ve been and she chats about her grandkids. The two of you have an authentic real person to real person kind of chat while you’re there, and she’s smiling and you are too as you leave.
Then you look around. Does the manager get what’s going on here? No, he’s standing over by an end cap talking with a couple of other employees, and he doesn’t seem to pay any attention at all. He might walk by sometimes and think, "Got a good one there." But is it part of the store or chain’s conscious effort to make more employees bond with customers? No. The company has several formalized pep rally approaches to make this happen, but if you’re one of those employees not getting health benefits or who just took the job because it’s the only place that would have you, or work in the meat department where the products are shipped in each day because someone tried to start a union once, chances are you leave any cheerfulness you have left at the door when you come in to work every day.
Point here is that you have to bake customer experience supply chain management into every part of the culture. And you have to measure and reward people accordingly. If they do not have the incentive to get the design and implementation right, it won’t happen. So it needs to be a performance metric across the board. Everyone should have their impact to the customer experience defined and understood, metrics need to be developed, and people must be rewarded for achievement. Everyone.
Wal-Mart has an idea and is making an effort. They certainly have product supply side management down with respect to price, but you don’t quite get the design quality you do at Target, and you most often don’t even approach the service you get at a Nordstrom store. It’s all about price, and when the wars begin, that isn’t always going to be everything. You refer back to Sam Walton’s "10 points" for his stores and you can see that he understood experience chain management.[23] The whole orchestration of what should be happening at each store is right there. But Wal-Mart is really only living up to one of those ten points, and that’s the one about price, and it may well make them vulnerable. The rapid rise of Dollar General stores and others like it hint that the storm clouds are gathering.
Many of the things that worked once are going to be challenged going forward, and that’s why you are going to need to be design driven if you are going to survive the change. We mentioned that the experience supply chain is one connecting continuum from customer experience all the way back to the beginning of the material supply chain. A reason that this whole idea of defining your customer experience, and building out how it’s going to happen along all these links is harder now, is that the way it all happens today is very different than it was five, and especially ten, years ago.
What’s changed is that there are so many entities involved. It used to be that companies really held very tightly to their supply chain and they wanted to design all their own materials, then develop all their own materials, and closely hold how they came to the system. So companies had a lot of infrastructure around development and manufacturing. That used to be how companies were successful—they really were great at that, they owned it, and it was proprietary.
The way it is today, you no longer own all the links in the chain. You have all these other companies that you contract with and bring in, you hire someone to manage the logistics, and it’s all leveraged and outsourced. In that scenario, how do you maintain consistency? Or strategic consistency is a better term; you don’t just want to be consistent, you want to be strategically consistent. How do you do that? You do that by defining very clearly what your customer experience is to be, the design language and everything else, and then have all your various partners and vendors comply to that and work to it. You run the risk of, by outsourcing so much, that you just end up with a hodgepodge of components. You have so many different viewpoints and methodologies coming into a process that in the end it can affect what the consumer sees. It’s no longer something you know as well or even own, but still you have to manage it. Doing it all and doing it well and being consistent and vigilant about achieving and sustaining design integrity isn’t easy.
You Can Do It, We Can’t Help
Let’s look at an instance where the plan was good but someone threw a wrench into the working machinery. If you went into a Home Depot store when they first opened, you were greeted, directed to the aisle you wanted, and there you were met by an expert at what you wanted to do, whether find a paint to match or get a board trimmed so you can get back home and fix whatever it was that needed fixing. This was the experience design they built a store and a business around. Plus, of course, warehouse pricing.
Most of the floor representatives for each department were retired contractors or some other sort of experienced person who was able to really live up to the store’s motto, "You can do it; we can help." In plumbing, you find a woman who surprises you by knowing more about pipes and fittings than you ever thought you wanted to know. You need to replace a toilet, you tell her, and you want to do it yourself, as you’ve heard can be done, to save a monster plumbing bill. She helps you figure out how much you want to spend and which fixture will best fit the space you have, and the next thing you know all the parts are loaded onto an oversized rolling cart and she’s telling you exactly how to use the bee’s wax seal that will have to be popped into place at the right time so you don’t end up with a leak. You go home and you do it. That’s how it was supposed to work, and that’s how it did.
A few months later, you need to fix a PVC fitting, so you head to Home Depot. You know you need some kind of purple stuff and special glue and that there are elbows and such involved and you barely know what size of the white plastic pipe you’re using. You have to find the section by yourself. It’s now out by lumber, the last place you would have looked. You look around for help, get none. You ask a guy in an orange smock and he only works with wood and barely knows what a two by four is at that. So you go all the way inside to the plumbing department, looking for your plumbing angel, but she’s gone. What the hell? When you do finally just go back, grab some stuff you hope will work, and head for a checkout counter, there’s no one there. You have to ring up the items yourself, and that means looking a couple of them up on a chart. Steam is coming out of both ears and the "You Can Do It" stuff you’re thinking about now involves the store manager and a wood chipper.
So, what happened here? The fact is, spreadsheet happened. When Bob Nardelli was Home Depot’s CEO, the company decided to save money by eliminating the more costly area experts and also doing away with the ease of having a knowledgeable human being check you out. Instead of saving money, the company went into a tail spin that not only lost a significant portion of its customer base, but it also cost the company its supporting investors. One small step for Excel, one giant step for customer experience supply chain disaster. Didn’t do much for Home Depot’s stock price either.
Investment web sites were the first canaries to sense trouble in the coal mine. The Seeking Alpha web site’s billboard read: "Home Depot: Should I Hold A Stock If My Customer Experience There Stinks?"[24] The web site of The Dividend Guy said, "It was probably the worst shopping experience I have ever had."[25] Think these are just ripples in the pond? Even Warren Buffet sold all his Home Depot stock.
The problem—once the pond was poisoned—permeated the entire customer experience chain. As Ohlin Associates put it: "No kinks revealed themselves more systematically or consistently than HD’s externally managed rebates and warranty programs."[26] You only have to visit a few blog sites to see how widespread this annoyance had become.
It didn’t take forever for Home Depot to wake up and spot the empty space where customers used to stand. Out went Nardelli and in came a new CEO, Frank Blake. He knew enough to go back to the secret sauce, being design driven around customer experience. But would it be enough? The folks at Ohlin tested his level of commitment and became believers that if anyone could make the turnaround, Frank Blake could. They said,
"With scandal close behind and Lowes around the corner, HD is now acknowledging an eternal truth: that its huge capital investments require constant customer feeding and development across all levels of the organization. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. By paying attention not just to cutting costs through outsourcing and managing inventory better, but to the experiences of its customers, Frank Blake is building a culture that actively reaches out to you and me, telling us and showing us that Home Depot is putting every effort behind winning back your trust."[27]
What the W? A Hotel As Suite As They Come!
It is a comfortably warm Friday evening in June of 2001. Adam Campbell Smith and his wife Natalie get off a plane at La Guardia, head for baggage claim, and are relieved that their bags actually made it. So far so good. Natalie has Duke, their chihuahua in a carry-on satchel, and the three of them, along with the luggage, head across the Triborough Bridge in a cab bound for Manhattan and an experience they swear will be different this time. They’d had a budget one-week honeymoon in New York City years ago, and to celebrate a promotion and a twentieth wedding anniversary, they were returning to the Island from Iowa to do it right this time. A friend at work had given Adam the word that if he really wanted to do it right, he should pass on the Plaza and check in at the W. With some trepidation, Adam switched reservations. "What kind of hotel has a one-letter name?" he wondered. Still, when it came to romantic hotels, his friend was "the man."
And here they were, swept into a lobby that looks like someone’s swank and very comfortable living room. They are greeted as if friends of the family. In the elevator, Natalie clears her throat and hopes she isn’t getting a cold. Adam eyes a bottle of wine a bellhop is taking to another room. They are no sooner in their room, oohing and aahing over the natural tones of wood and nature, a bed that looks divinely inviting, and fixtures that make them feel they’ve moved into a new home and not a hotel, when the bell rings and at the door is a bellhop with a cart.
"We didn’t order anything," they say.
"I know," says the bellhop, delivering a bowl of chicken soup to soothe Natalie’s throat along with a bottle of the wine Adam had been eyeing.
"How did they know?" Adam says. Natalie is gratefully tucking into her soup and Duke is exploring his W dog bed and has even found a doggie treat on his pillow.
"It’s like they know what we want before we want it," Natalie says over her spoon. "Are we in the Twilight Zone?" she wonders out loud.
Here we have a hotel staff trained to pick up on every nuance of your body language as you go to your room, and one that responds by anticipating your needs. W Hotels has actually trained its staff to pick up on every clue to your experience and to respond to it. It could be spooky if you didn’t end up feeling so pampered and special, which is just how you’re supposed to feel at the W.
In the morning, Natalie is off to the hotel spa, Adam to the gym, and a staff member walks Duke in Central Park. How can you not love this kind of service? It is the kind of thing that won W Hotels one of FastCompany.com’s 2005 Customers First Awards—that above and beyond sort of experience that can only be designed into a stay.
Ever been to a hotel and had a bad experience? Barry Sternlicht had, and the difference between him and a number of other disgruntled hotel patrons is that he decided to do something about it. He kept track of every pet peeve and used those to design a hotel experience that corrected every flaw.[28] The theme for his idea of a genuine feeling home away from home stay for weary travelers was something: welcoming, witty, warm, wonderful, whimsical, wow, and wired. Hence, the origin of the W Hotels, a line of quite stylish boutique suites, where each suite embodies and incorporates every function a traveler wants or needs, and then some.
As with Cirque du Soleil, the hotel chain sought to reinvent itself with every new hotel that opened. Like any design-driven enterprise, function was very much a part of form. What Sternlicht was after in every opening was a unique brand experience that was hip, fun, even exciting. He launched the W Hotels brand in 1998 with the original W Hotel in New York City, on 541 Lexington Avenue, followed with one in Atlanta, and continued to expand through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Mexico City, Seoul, Dallas, and Chicago, until there are more than thirty locations. But, to answer the quintessential question here: Why another hotel? What was so missing in the lineup for those who wish to travel in style and comfort?
The operating sensibility that drove Sternlicht was, "Why should a visit to a hotel not feel like being at home?" He wanted an experience that was "like home, only better." He took a look at traditional hotels and saw pretty much the same old same old—an expectable sort of bedspreads and fixtures that screamed: "another night at a hotel." With all the quality products out there for the home, why should a hotel not take advantage. So the W Hotels went for designs that incorporate looks from nature for fresh looks quite unlike hotel rooms. The W beds are cloud-like layers of mattresses and feather beds with goose down duvets, just like Sternlicht had at home. He paid attention to every detail of lighting and design and behind it all sought to land on rooms that communicated that they were "cool and hip," not just comfortable. That meant oversized long desks, large TVs, and spacious bathrooms too. Wireless keyboards in every room, super-fluff towels, and over-sized shower heads all merge into a seamless sexier sort of place to stay. Even the lobbies of the hotels give the look and feel of a living room.
Sternlicht admitted that he had aimed to design class for mass, but ended up with a four-star brand, one that now offers lines of products that reflect and merchandise the W Hotel lifestyle. Other planned locations include Athens, Istanbul, Doha, Dubai, Santiago, Hong Kong, and numerous sites around the globe. A part of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, which has more than 860 hotels in more than 95 countries, W Hotels continue to prosper and grow, even though Sternlicht stepped down as CEO in 2004 to give his full attention to his other firm, Starwood Capital. The W Hotels weathered a tour as CEO by Steven J. Heyer, who was asked to step down by the Board because of management style issues and allegations of personal misconduct. As of September, 2007, Frits van Paasschen was appointed CEO of the W Hotel line.
The line continues to live up to its design-driven origins with unique offerings. For instance, everything is stylized in W Hotels; reception is referred to as "Welcome," the pool is "Wet." Just one of the unique promotions W Hotels has pioneered in recent years is "Woof." All five W Hotels in New York welcome canine guests with a doggy Signature W Bed, a doggy Bathrobe, a turndown treat, and doggysitting services that include walks through Central Park. If you reserve a Mega Suite at the W Seoul location, the Walkerhill, the hotel will have a red Jaguar waiting for you at the airport. W Hotels in Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York all feature Bliss Spas.
Taking customer experience to a new level was enough to prove to the rest of the hotel industry that there is room for a fresh and innovative approach. For W Hotels to continue its growth along this experience design path will take all the things we’ve talked about. So far, most customers seem to agree that the experience is just plain "Wonderful."
That’s really customer experience supply chain management in a nutshell. In the pages ahead, you’ll look at ways to thoroughly understand and implement what we’ve been talking about. But think for a moment about this: How sweet could it be to start out right in the first place, or, if already started, not stumble and have to do everything all over again to make things right!
Once you see your design-driven products and services as portals to experiences that matter to your customers and grasp the need for experience supply chain management and are ready to walk the walk, you will take a look in the next chapter about how to talk the talk by learning a little about design language and how it becomes part of your strategy and how you build your product brand.