Читать книгу Blind Spot - Nathan Shedroff - Страница 25

In improvised situations, the company responds directly to what a customer says or does in a freeform way. This type of interaction offers a much more human sense of give and take. That’s why improvised interactions offer the greatest potential for success and, needless to say, for failure.

Starwood Hotels, for example, treats its best customers to a concierge service. This is a single person whose phone number you have. You can call that person whenever you like, even if you’re just in the planning stages of your trip. Your special person helps you with whatever unique needs you have, hopefully producing a valued experience. The things she suggests you do on the road also can help you have a great experience. Most importantly, however, she gets to know you over time and can serve you better as the relationship continues. Such a service is improvised because it responds to your unique inputs and grows in its ability to help you.

Improvisation has a long history within various kinds of storytelling, especially in music and theater. The principles that jazz musicians and improvisational actors use may go by different titles but share important similarities:

• Accept all offers (an offer is a prompt or action on the part of one character). Denying an offer by ignoring it kills game play and creates an unresponsive experience. Accepting an offer moves the story forward collaboratively.

• Rather than trying to devise an offer, assume one has already been made (by a customer’s actions or an event in the environment). Act on those offers. In other words, don’t wait for your customers to do something or be explicit about their desires; engage them proactively.

• Use what’s already there. Rather than specifically creating new material that may be erroneous or take too much time, use what’s already present in the experience and relationships. Allow customers to use their own material (information, preferences, ideas, and so on), but be ready with suggestions if they get stuck.

Improvisation is a good analogy for how many customer experiences unfold, and it’s especially important in digital media (though more difficult to accomplish). If there isn’t a person guiding the experience (like a salesperson or customer support agent), the system should improvise and provide a coherent experience, automatically, no matter what the customer does. This provides more value than a static experience that is the same for everyone, regardless of what they do, but it requires much more thought, planning, and engineering. However, if you value the best experiences, websites and online services must do this, regardless of the complexity. Games do this, inherently, as the experience unfolds for a user despite the variations in behavior that she may exhibit (not to mention her goals). This kind of system behavior creates an experience that goes far beyond mere tasks, and it enables both the reaction to and the expression of emotions, values, and core meanings by customers and audiences (and influence over the customer’s state of mind).

Which type of interaction you have or choose is up to you. The important thing is to have the right interaction, to evoke the right experience, for the right person, at the right time because you considered it, not because others have done it or it’s a default.