Customer Experience Design | “The Customers’ Experience is The Brand.”
Brand touchpoints, customer experience, and customer journeys: however we define it, the way customers experience a business matters. In competitive and increasingly commoditised B2B markets, companies can become focused on transactional selling to meet sales targets. Specialist sales and customer-management teams build strong interpersonal relationships at the sales coalface, but these do not necessarily create a broader loyalty to the company — the brand equity that ultimately drives brand value.
Fuga helped a print-materials supplier turn its Head Office into a Customer Experience Centre — not simply a showroom, but a tool for building relationships with the company and its brand. The brief was to create a space for printers and designers to attend events, training sessions and product launches, discover products and visit the factory.
The ground floor was stripped back to its essential architectural components to create an industrial showroom ‘blank canvas’, with a central bar forming the social heart of the Customer Experience Centre. Designed as a statement in its own right, the bar gave the space a natural place to meet, gather and host events, while the exhibition area applied the “Framing Effect” literally: modular display units and furniture provided a strong, recognisable identity while having enough presence to “carry off” whatever artwork, print materials or products were placed within them.
But the environment alone could not deliver the brief. The Customer Experience Centre needed to become part of the way the business operated. The 3m² display units were designed to be moved, updated and personalised by a company manager with little or no design experience, giving the team ownership of the space and the freedom to create new experiences continually. Displays could combine company products with commissioned work from artists, photographers, illustrators, printers and fabric designers, while events and customer visits generated PR, web content and opportunities to demonstrate the company’s expertise. The design became a practical tool for engaging customers, generating content and building the brand.
