Customer Briefing Centres can take many guises: from ‘Experience Centres’ to immersive reception areas.
They have proven benefits to help elevate your customers’ experience with your brand, strengthen business relationships, and strongly influence your client’s decision to purchase.
The ability to offer a personalised, engaging, and transformative experience can help support an organisation’s sales team in demonstrating how their solutions can add value and help solve critical business challenges.
The rate of investment in Customer Briefing Centres in the UK is growing. A study by the Association of Briefing Program Managers reported that Customer Briefing Centres rank highest for activities relating to the faster closing of enterprise deals, especially where prospect interaction and feedback are important in the sales cycle. They also reported 77 percent of visitors decided to purchase products or services discussed in their briefings.
What are the key considerations an organisation should take when planning their next Customer Briefing Centre project?
Whether you are designing your first Customer Briefing facility or upgrading an existing centre, it’s crucial that it’s designed well from both an aesthetical and technological standpoint.
Briefing Centres have evolved into sophisticated physical spaces that facilitate personalised demonstrations and discussions. Every centre is unique to its organisation, meaning that no one size fits all, making technology systems design a key consideration in achieving a highly functioning, results-driven investment.
1. Define your audience
Who will be visiting? What level of visitor will they be? Employee? Middle management? Director level? How do they prefer to interact with content and technology?
2. Understand the purpose of your Centre
What’s the reason for the Centre? Is it to demonstrate products, sell ideas, develop relationships, or increase the profile of the company brand?
3. Look at the whole visitor journey
Think about what happens when the visitor walks through the door, or even before that when they pull up in the car park. How are they greeted? What is the visitor route through the building to the centre? How long will a visit take and is the visit presentation based, demonstration-based, or a combination of the two? Is the presentation one-to-one or one-to-many? When the visitor leaves how will they receive a copy of the presentation? What is the last thing the visitor sees, as this will create a lasting impression?
4. Script the visitor experience
It’s useful to script and time the visits for all types of customer. This makes the designers and technology specialists’ jobs simpler to configure and construct the space while implementing the right technology to achieve your objectives.
5. Use audio visual carefully
Don’t just implement technology for technology’s sake. Once the journey/script have been planned, it will become clearer where technology can support the visitor experience. It needs to add value and compliment the content and products on display. It’s advisable to speak to an audio visual consultant at this stage who can help suggest technologies that can provide the ‘WOW’ factor, while being reliable and easy to use and maintain.
6. Construct a team of Customer Briefing Centre specialists
A team of highly specialised people construct the best centres – they can include architects, exhibition designers, project managers, lighting designers, audio visual specialists, and fit-out contractors. In addition, content and media producers are key; having the best presentation facilities or displays means nothing if they aren’t supported with compelling stories, media, and sound.
7. Maintain your EBC to provide optimum results
Once the system is designed, it’s important to keep it up and running so there are no lost visits due to faulty equipment. A centre that ‘just works’ will ensure maximum uptime as well as avoid any embarrassing moments due to technical issues.
A service agreement that covers the audio-visual technology is vital. If the centre is used every day, it is advisable to consider remote monitoring so issues can be fixed 24/7, or to employ an onsite audio-visual specialist.
Electrosonic has worked with many organisations to help them create Customer Briefing Centres that gets results. We use our experience from envisioning and executing experiences like The One World Observatory in New York and English Heritage’s Stonehenge Visitor Centre to replicate the ‘WOW’ factor used in global attractions in your business spaces.
