What we could all learn about customer experience from the mountain men

Last Saturday we celebrated my daughter's tenth birthday by having a party for her at Wolf Mountain in Wolverhampton.  For the uninitiated, the folk at Wolf Mountain describe it as an 'indoor climbing and caving centre' although they seem to offer far more activities, both indoors and outdoors, than that.  This might seem like an unusual party venue for young girls - but my daughter is quite adventurous and likes to try new and different activities.

The party was a big success.  The girls climbed a variety of climbing walls - and loved the guide from the centre who was there to support them and look after their safety.  After completing their climbing they moved on to archery and once again enjoyed the relationship with their guide who kept them safe, helped them to hit the target (surprisingly regularly actually) and did it in a way that meant they had a constant smile on their faces.  The same guide then sat with them whilst they had party food in one of the 'party rooms' at the venue.

As I said, the event was a big success.  All the kids went home happy and smiling.  Not too much to ask I know, but it was nevertheless a surprise to me.

You see the guys at Wolf Mountain are obviously skilled at the activities they lead and they're clearly knowledgeable and experienced.  You need only look at them to see it, they look like they've been around, they've done everything you'll be doing - and far more.  They even looked as you would expect mountaineers and cavers to look.  A bit worn and well.....weathered.  And because of that it was a bit of surprise when the experience we had was .......excellent.

It was all about their focus on the experience their customers had whilst they were there.  They encouraged parents and other family members to also 'have a go', free of charge.  I did by the way!  They communicated in a way that made you realise that the activities difficult and made parents and children alike feel good about what they achieved.  And if there was anything customers couldn't do it was ok because of how tough it is. They were infectiously enthusiastic. And they cleverly involved other, more experienced customers (Wolf Mountain seems to get lots of customers who go there regularly) to interact with the new ones, offer their help and add further enthusiasm.  They didn't watch the clock, actually they took a bit longer than anticipated to ensure that everyone was able to participate fully and succeed.  And they invited people back.

It really was a fantastic experience and we're already planning our next visit as a family.

The experience reinforced my view on three things:

1. Make sure that people who are customer facing are enthusiastic about the product or service.  It's a given that they're knowledgeable about it, but does their experience of it go beyond that?  Do they use it?  And is their enthusiasm for it obvious?
2. Design the experience around the customer, not the organisation.  Better to take a little longer and achieve the desired experience than cut it short, and fail.
3. It's about the experience the customer has, not the service the business offers.  The product at Wolf Mountain is good and the service is ok too, but the value added bits that make the overall experience brilliant are about how the people there make you feel.

Replicate Wolf Mountain somewhere else and it would be good.  But it wouldn't necessarily be excellent, because as great businesses know, the brilliance comes from people.

To anyone within travelling distance of Wolverhampton - try it out, I recommend it!

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019

The value of good deeds in a naughty world

I did a lot of reading during the Christmas and New Year break and some of the stuff I read really stimulated my thinking.  One article particularly resonated with me - and I wanted to share it with you in my first post of 2013. 

It was entitled 'Why kindness can help businesses grow' and was essentially about Henrietta Lovell, a UK based entrepreneur who is gaining quite a reputation as she grows her business: the Rare Tea Company.  It tells the story of how, after an experience of drinking a wonderful tea in Hong Kong, she began to question the quality of the big brand teas available in UK supermarkets and realised that the tea she had fallen for in Hong Kong was simply not available in the UK.

She travelled to tea-growing places in China and Africa, and "fell in love with tea and the people who grew it."  And as a result she started her Rare Tea Company to sell some of the enticing teas she bought straight from the growers in exotic places.

Much of the rest of the article details how, as a result of extraordinary acts of kindness, she has been able to rapidly grow the Rare Tea Company brand and her own reputation.

The author of the article, Peter Day, then goes on to comment on the "business of kindness", as he calls it.  He writes:
"Why shouldn't this be another way of doing business, far removed from the brash competitiveness that businesses think they are all about? There is, surely, far more to running a company than the preposterous cut-throat competition of the TV challenge show, The Apprentice.

Why can't businesses be run with a generosity of spirit and a lot of goodwill? Henrietta Lovell says it can be done, but hers may be just a good deed in a naughty world.
I would like to think not. It may be the start of a trend. Companies have got away with nominal good behaviour for years. They do what their lawyers and their marketing people tell them they are obligated to do, and nothing much more.

As the banking crisis demonstrated, they did what they could get away with, driven by what they maintained was the interests of their shareholders, and the bosses revelling in the status symbol of their bonuses.

Now blinking in the glare of publicity - businesses may be waking up to other, more deep-seated, obligations. Good people may in the end decide they do not want to work for inhuman or merely operationally effective companies. They will want more from work than pay and promotion. They will want to be nice. They will want the organisations they work for to be kind.

That is what customers are discovering they want, too. They want to deal with businesses that work in decent ways, that reflect their own feelings about the world."

There's no doubt in my mind that he's right.  This trend has been underway for some time already, and I'm convinced it's going to accelerate in the coming years.  It's the big opportunity for businesses that respond to it, and a huge risk for those that don't.

Peter Day goes on to write: "It would be nice to think that the business of kindness will not be captured by professional marketeers and become just another device for paying lip service to how people think business ought to behave.

It would be nice to be un-cynical about it. It would be nice to think that kindness is a way of doing business that might infect lots of big business rather than just a few pioneers."

I guess we'll see.....

The full article can be found here: Why kindness can help businesses grow

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield

Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019