What Disney Taught Me About Designing Customer Experience

The Gist

• Great customer experience is designed, not accidental. Lessons from Disney show that memorable experiences come from empowering frontline employees to create moments of flexibility, empathy and surprise.
• Magic starts with mastering the basics. Understanding customer needs through frontline insight, informal interviews and journey mapping reveals where friction exists—and where delight is possible.
• Experience innovation only works if it’s operationalized. Testing ideas, aligning internal processes and equipping frontline staff are essential to turning “magic” from a concept into a repeatable customer experience.

I worked at Disney World for a semester when I was an undergrad. My short stint there formed my whole perspective on how to treat guests — and I still use those concepts in my work today, more than 20 years later.

Disney gave me the first clues about how important it is to instill in employees the value of consumer experience. Disney understands what it means to make a magical experience for its consumers. It understands that some customers would spend their life's savings to take their family to the park for that one special trip. Disney is guest focused and because of that, every worker — cast members — has a part to play to keep the vital magic alive.

Disney is able to keep the magic alive by creating a system of flexibility for cast members to create magical moments. Disney also gives staff the ability to pivot for those moments to happen. For me, it was the ability to create stories about talking to characters and experiences visitors would see in the park that day. While the guest was able to see the magic, I was able to help create the magic.

When we think about the products we build, whether it is a physical product or a digital product, we want to borrow a little bit of that Disney magic. We don't want to just build a product, we want to create an experience. People's attention spans are short today and to grab someone's devotion, there must be some magic designed in the product. Think about it this way: when was the last time you interacted with a digital product where you were truly surprised and delighted by the experience?

So we need to ask f how we create an experience of magic for our customers. How do we become magical architects, developing ways for our customers to feel a magical experience throughout their customer lifespan with us?

Table of Contents

• Understanding of Customers Basics
• Imagining a Better Process for Customer Journeys
• Deploying the Magic of Customer Experience
• Defining and Designing “Magic” Across the Customer Journey

Understanding of Customers Basics

For us to understand what magic could potentially look like, we need to understand what the basics of our customers' experience are. We can assess the basics in a few ways:

• Informal Interviews: Do you have consumers that are willing to talk about their experiences? Do you have employees who use your products? Sometimes we must be brave to ask non-judgmental questions about people's experiences with our products. These informal interviews can start to paint the picture of where potential opportunities to create a magic experience lie.
• Tapping Front Line Employees: What front line staff are hearing from our consumers is an underutilized information source that we need to tap into. These members of our team are hearing from our consumers on some of their biggest challenges. By tapping into these resources, we can narrow down what the challenge is.
• Consumers Process: Once you have an idea of where there may be challenges for the consumer, it is time to truly understand what the consumer must do to either get around the challenge or to just do what they are trying to do. This is where mapping out the consumer's process is key and one of the hardest things to do. To map the out the process of a consumer, you have in the consumer's shoes, not operations.

Related Article: Your Missed Opportunity in Customer Experience Culture

Imagining a Better Process for Customer Journeys

After understanding what the customers basic experience is, the challenges that they face, hearing from front line employees and asking the right questions, we need to see where we can imagine a better process. Effective customer journey mapping is essential to this effort. For us to do this, we need to do:

• Looking at Those Operational Maps: By looking at our internal processes we can see where we may have created challenges to our consumers. Once we identify those potential challenges, we can see why and how we have created those challenges. This gives us the ability to ask if those challenges created because of mandates, protection of our business and consumers, or were those challenges created out of poor alignment of needs?
• Merging Both Views: When we can simultaneously look at operational maps of the process and the journey map of the consumer, we can see areas that we can imagine a better process. By looking at both maps we can see what we can control, what we can change and how that improves a consumer process. This is where we can figure out what is a better process versus what is the best process for our consumers.

Deploying the Magic of Customer Experience

Being an architect of magic doesn't just consist of coming up with an idea to create a magical customer experience, but it also consists of how to implement that idea. For us to produce that idea and make sure it gives the right sparks, we need to make sure that we:

• Test the idea: While no one wants to hear the word test, a great experience in theory with the wrong research can blow up the idea of a magical experience and may create a nightmare. This is why testing for the end user is vital. During the testing phase, we can start with internal and front-line staff, those consumers that are also employees and then branch out to those that we have surveyed before. Using front line employees and consumers who have previously given feedback, this gives us the ability to say we have heard their concerns and made changes. When people spend time giving feedback especially if the feedback is not stellar, there are times that they expect nothing to come from it. By showing that we take their feedback serious, starts to build customer trust which then can create magic.
• Launching Magic: There are many ways to deploy and launch a magical intervention you have created. In some cases, you may not want to make an announcement to your consumers and that depends on the experience before you created an intervention. However, there is one group that you should always notify of a new magical experience, and that is your front-line staff. They need to know how this intervention will interact with consumers so they can help guide that experience with them if necessary.

Defining and Designing “Magic” Across the Customer Journey

To truly become an architect of magic, it's essential to define what "magic" means for your audience, recognizing that the process begins by asking thoughtful questions about their expectations and experiences. By delving into these definitions and assessing the customer journey, we can uncover opportunities to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This involves not only understanding but also empathizing with the consumer's process, allowing us to identify moments where innovation can transform routine interactions into memorable experiences.

Imagining how to weave magic into each touchpoint means seeing beyond the basic needs and envisioning delightful surprises that resonate with customers. Developing magic, then, is a continuous cycle of listening, imagining, and implementing, always with the intent to spark joy and foster lasting customer loyalty throughout every stage of the customer experience.

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