What Does Your Customer Experience Smell Like?

IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group) announced recently that they are deepening the design of their customer experience by creating signature smells for their hotels as part of their guest experience.

This makes a lot of sense. The sense of smell accounts for 70 per cent of what our emotional recall is based on, according to some researchers.

So, do you design the smell and other senses such as the sound of your customer experience? Most organizations don't. BMW does. They design in that 'new car smell' on purpose because research says their customers like it. They tune the exhaust to 'sound like a BMW'. They understand that the 'ultimate driving experience' is one that engages all the senses.

Kjell Nordstrom, the economist, recently explained how Chris Bangle, the former BMW design guru, took him on a tour of BMW's 'door room' - a giant hangar full of car doors mounted on rigs, with engineers all over the place slamming the doors shut and recording the sounds of the doors. It's how they get that satisfying and reassuring BMW 'thunk' sound as the car door closes.

Designing the 'sound' of your experience is a concept most organizations don't even address because even the word 'design' has visual origins, so excludes sound. But, here's an example of what it can achieve: At Glasgow airport they play natural, ambient sounds (birds singing, plus soothing chill-out music underneath it) over the loudspeakers to relax travelers. Sales in the airport shops went up 10%.(No, it wasn't birdseed...)

So, smell and sound are part of your customer experience. If you don't design them in, you leave them to chance. But we know that the biggest impact on how we feel about an experience is the behavior of the people that deal with us and yet that is often overlooked because it is intangible. In our book See, Feel, Think, Do, we analyze how you need to take into account the senses, how your customers feel and indeed your own gut instinct when running your organization.

At smith+co we recently worked with a global hotel group on creating the desired emotional experience for guests, as part of a major brand refresh exercise. Leading organizations are increasingly realizing that the customer experience is integral to the brand and must be 'engineered' not just left to the front-line to figure out for themselves. Do contact us if this is the kind of help you need in developing your own customer experience.