The Power of Digital Experience Centers

Imagine this: You’re working with a high value customer, getting ready to start a major project together. You sit down at your computer and open the meeting. Your client’s C-suite of executives appear on screen, easily visible to you and each other, along with your company’s intro video playing in the background. You start the meeting with introductions and seamlessly pull up a world map that automatically shows each person’s location along with the territories they cover as they speak. 

You then move on to the first exercise, a themed icebreaker customized to the project you will be working on today. Each attendee can participate by selecting preset icons to answer relevant questions, so everyone’s answer is easy to see and quick to deliver. Your clients are fully engaged and immersed in the experience your brand is providing, and enthusiastic to begin working with you.

That is what a digital customer experience center can deliver, and why it matters to your business.

What Is the Purpose of an Experience Center?

The purpose of a customer experience center (also called customer briefing or brand experience centers) is to immerse your clients in your brand while focusing on their needs. Ideally, the customer feels like they are co-authoring a solution tailor-made for their needs. 

These centers aren’t just about making a sales pitch. They are designed to:

• Educate customers on your brand and how it could provide value
• Build trust in your business
• Show that you truly value your customers
• Illustrate your innovative use of the latest technology and best practices
• Validate your ability to solve their problems

What Is a Digital Experience Center?

A digital experience center is simply a subset of the wider idea of a customer experience center, where participants interact virtually. These digital experience centers are more than just a virtual meeting where the moderator shares a Powerpoint. They are all about using digital experience platforms to truly bring your audience on a customized trip through all your brand has to offer—a place where you can talk about the world and DO the work.

Many in-person experience center events will include virtual attendees, so the impression of the people joining digitally always matters. But there are a variety of situations where the ability to run a fully virtual experience would provide even more value. 

These digital experience centers could easily come into play if:

• Your company doesn’t have a dedicated in-person space appropriate for a large event.
• Your company wants to allocate all the budget to creating a stellar virtual experience instead of splitting resources between technology and physical space expenses.
• Important client representatives (like the CEO) suddenly aren’t able to attend in person due to travel issues, illness, or scheduling conflicts.
• Relevant customer attendees are based over a large geographic area and do not wish to travel to attend a physical event.
• A pandemic or other natural disaster makes holding a physical event implausible.

What Is a Digital Experience Platform?

The definition of a digital experience platform, Gartner defines a digital experience platform  as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” In the case of a digital experience center, this platform is the technology you use to create and run an event in this center. 

Since digital experiences are entirely virtual, the technology you use plays the most essential role in your success. Have you ever been working with an important client on a web call, only to need to stop a productive conversation to ask someone else to share a screen or advance to the next slide? Do you cringe when it happens because you know what kind of impression these technology glitches make on potential customers?

If so, the digital experience solutions you currently have in place are limiting your potential for customer experiences. Upgrading your digital experience strategy to include a platform that enables all the features you want can make all the difference. Alleo is one of the top digital experience companies and specializes in creating world class digital experience centers for our enterprise clients.

Digital Experience Centers: What Are Examples of the Customer Experience?

Let’s go through a few digital experience examples to give some concrete cases of how virtual experience centers can be used across different industries.

Case 1: Enterprise Consulting Firm

A consulting firm is beginning to work with a professional sports franchise to plan their upcoming season and develop their marketing budget. To kickoff the project, their team invites ten of the top decision makers within the franchise to a day-long event in their digital experience center. 

1. The event opens with a welcome slide that includes all attendees web cam views, and a custom highlights reel of past successful campaigns carried out by this client (showing the consulting firm has done their homework).
2. Each member of the consulting firm introduces themselves, opening a custom slide with their specific areas of expertise and the role they will play within this event and the wider project. 
3. An ice breaker begins with the question “What is your favorite sport to watch?” Each participant’s video is automatically lined up across the top, everyone selects their answer from a preset list of icons (like football, track, swimming), then everyone’s selected icons appear under their video. Participants are more engaged than if they were doing the same activity by typing in chat or answering verbally (which takes forever and can be dull).
4. A short presentation begins on the team’s successes and challenges for the pre-season, guest hosted by the team’s head coach. She uses the main display space of the virtual platform as a white board with preloaded video clips, player bios, and field graphics. She’s able to draw new plays directly on screen, sharing the team’s infectious enthusiasm for the upcoming season. Her presentation finishes up with some roadblocks the team is facing.
5. A brainstorming activity begins around roadblocks faced by the team’s audience. Each participant is invited to add a potential roadblock they see for their audiences. These roadblocks are added instantly to the central work space. Each participant is then asked to drag and drop an icon of the team’s logo to each roadblock they also recognize as a problem.

International Hotel

A world renowned hotel group is creating a digital experience for the executives of the top 25 travel agencies they would like to promote their holdings. The hotel executives plan a two-day digital experience with ten of their own important stakeholders and 50 travel agent execs. 

1. The event begins with a welcome page that includes the logos for each travel agency, and participant’s video displays under their agency. 
2. During introductions, the logo for the agency introducing itself enlarges to fill the screen, and each attendee video display enlarges as they share their name and role. The view also includes a map where they simply click to highlight the travel destinations they specialize in.
3. An ice breaker starts asking “What is your favorite vacation type?” Each participant selects from a preset list of options like beach, mountain, city, adventure. Because the size of the group makes taking in individual data more difficult, the results are shown as a pie graph and each one section can be clicked to show the individual respondents.
4. A presentation begins that features a celebrity fan of the hotel. They provide a voice-over narration of a recent trip they took staying at one of the hotel locations. The celebrity switches views within the presentation to show personal video of them in the hotel, official photo shoots of them at nearby attractions, and their social media posts during the trip. 
5. A feedback activity starts where each participant can anonymously add a sticky note to a central board about what parts of travel are most important to their guests. The moderator can then help the group organize the sticky notes into overall categories and discuss how a hotel might help address each main category.

How Do I Create an Experience Center?

Now that we’ve gone over some concrete experience center examples, let’s talk through how to create this type of immersive customer experience.

• Step 1: Focus on the customer. This should be customer-focused from start to finish, so make sure you think about what type of customer you are making this center for, in what way it will add value to them, and what will they need it to do to meet their needs.
• Step 2: Choose the right technology. Before you can plan what will be included in your center, you have to choose one of the digital experience platform companies that will work best for you. You want to pick a platform that is infinitely customizable but also offers flexibility and is simple to use, like Alleo.
• Step 3: Create a strong theme or flow for your experience. Creating various immersive experiences is great, but making them one cohesive experience center means they need to be connected through story and purpose.
• Step 4: Plan each individual component you want to include, then think about how a customer would move between them in space or time. Make sure there is a range of learning moments, engagement opportunities, and brand interactions to keep the experience interesting and useful.
• Step 5: Follow up after the experience is over. A platform like Alleo lets you create permanent boards and store everyone’s comments, allowing you to stay connected as customers revisit the work done within the experience center.

Why Do You Need a Digital Experience Platform?

You need a digital experience platform if providing this level of experience with your brand is a priority. Enterprise businesses who are wasting valuable time trying to plan high caliber customer experiences by piecing together many different tech solutions need a better way. Companies that really want to show their prospects how they embrace innovation from the planning level on down need this. Businesses that value their customers and go above and beyond to show them rather than just tell them need this.

When you’re ready to provide a world class digital experience center for your clients, you need Alleo. Visit our website today, or contact us for more information.