Article

Expert advice: Never start with technology

Nanonation's vice president of business development explains that technology is but a means to an end when it comes to making customers happy.

August 14, 2006

Brian Ardinger is Nanonation's vice president of business development.

 

Today's leading companies are looking to technology to help engage customers and enhance the customer experience. The problem is too many companies start with the technology first.

 

If you're thinking you can deploy kiosks, digital signage, or any other customer experience technology by choosing a kiosk enclosure, a plasma screen, or a Web site to leverage, stop! Technologies are important — extremely important — but they are only a part of the solution.

 

To create powerful customer experiences, you need to start by understanding your customers — the ones actually interacting with your business in your aisles, your lobbies, your physical environment. If you understand their drivers and expectations, you'll be able to create the customer experiences that keep them coming back again and again.

 

Customers are great at asking the question "What's in it for me?" The more you can build your experiences to answer this question, the more success you will create. To do this, you have to understand what drives them, how to talk to them, and what's important to them while they're in your presence.

 

This means not only identifying the basic demographics, psychographics, and other various marketing insights, but asking: Why would your customers benefit from using the desired technology?

 

Believe it or not, too many companies look to deploy digital signage and kiosks without doing an analysis of the business objectives and benefits from deploying these technologies.

 

Putting up plasma screens to simply run 30-second TV spots is unlikely to deliver additional value to the customer interaction, while showcasing an existing Web site on a kiosk generally causes more problems than it solves in an in-store environment.

 

Worse than not carefully defining the business objectives is focusing solely on the business goals to the detriment of the customer objectives and ultimately the project. Look around the market and you'll see evidence of too many projects that cut too many corners, had too small of a budget, or failed to accurately measure the intended results. In the end these projects either cost the company more money to rework or died a slow death while antagonizing customers and hurting the business.

 

To avoid these pitfalls, it's important to understand how these technologies can fit into your existing business infrastructure and deliver compelling results to the business and the customer. Asking the right questions up front can help a business understand the various benefits and tradeoffs as they build out a technology solution.

 

The key is to match up your customers' requirements and expectations to a solution that meets your business objectives. Once you've analyzed the business objectives and matched them with the customer objectives, it's time to identify the unique environmental and location issues related to deploying public-space technologies.

 

How many times have you seen a kiosk buried in the back corner of a store generating no traffic, or digital signage screens placed 15-feet over the head of customers blaring audio out of tiny speakers? These environment choices can have lasting negative impressions on your brand and business.

 

To create an engaging customer experience the technology has to play well within the environment. From material choice of an enclosure (wood, metal, plastic) to traffic flow to lighting, ambient noise, and customer access, each location should be analyzed to ensure that the device matches customers' expectations, the brand experience, and the operational and logistical issues of the store itself.

 

Once you've analyzed the customer, business, and environment issues, then you need to select the technologies that can best address these issues and provide an adaptable and scalable solution.

 

Customer experience technologies consist of a variety of technologies from hardware to software to networking and systems integration. Each chosen technology, from the PC that drives the experience to the screen that displays it, can impact the customer experience.