The Savviness of Singapore: What They Understand About Customer Experience

During my years in the marketing department, we watched and listened to scores of companies around what they did in relation to "brand". We looked at companies that did branding well to be aware of and understand better what was at the foundation of a powerful brand and a powerful customer experience.

One of the companies we looked at was Singapore Airlines. Singapore Airlines, we learned, did "flying" in a different way. It wasn't as if they had found some special path to the far east and back.  The paths their planes took were similar to those taken by every other airline flying into and out of the same countries.

The particular path they have chosen to take as a company is not about where they go, but about how they get there and how they get the people on that path with them--their passengers-- to their final destination.  

But it's not just the Airlines, it may be--as David McQuillen suggests below-- the whole country. For those of you who remember the name David McQuillen (from the last post), listen, as David, Head of Group Customer Experience at OCDC Bank, talks about what he has discovered in Singapore and what he sees in the country's future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1F-QxhGGBE

What strikes you about this? 

David McQuillen on Customer Experience Immersion

One of the most memorable and unequivocally, one of the most convincing talks I've ever heard around the importance of understanding your customer's experience--i.e. what they are trying to do and what kind of experience they want to have--was from a man by the name of David McQuillen. David is the former head of the Customer Experience Group at Credit Suisse Bank, and he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Catalog Conference that I attended in Chicago.

His talk was amazing. But's it's power laid not in the volume or power of his speaking but in the truth and tranformative power of the story--he told a story about his experience being in the customers shoes and what changed for him as a result of having that experience. He wasn't speaking abstractly, or in theory, but about reality.

He told a story about one way that his company (at that time Credit Suisse) tried to understand their customers who faced disabilities, in this case, customers who were in wheelchairs. As a member of his team, he also, took a turn and spent the entire day working from a wheelchair.

(So, in this case, they didn't just observe their customers, but they took it a step further and immersed themselves in the actual experience of the customer.)

In this 1 minute 50 second clip (of the finale of the same story told at another conference), David shares what he came to understand from that day of --not just observing, but --being immersed in the experience of his customer.

p.s. for some reason, this video may take a couple minutes to load......

you may want to check your e-mail until it loads.... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsVB8YjrxvY&NR=1

 "Emotions are exceptionally powerful in convincing people

why an experience needs to be a good one."--David McQuillen