Page 14 - GBC Spring 2019 ENG

THE 4 E’S
Just for a moment, consider the last time you were a guest of a business and you were so delighted that you didn’t want the experience to end. Where were you? Who was there? What made the experience so meaningful to you? What will you never forget?
When you focus on service, you focus on making things easier. When you think experience, you focus on creating engagement that creates a memory. Memories are the hallmarks of experience.
I’m willing to bet that whatever it was, speci cally, that made your experience so memorable had nothing to do with the actual product itself. Instead, it was probably about the experience that the business created around the product.
My most recent experience that I wanted to continue was a dinner at The Hard Rock Café in London, UK. Trust me, you don’t go for the food. It was late and I had been on a trip with an early ight home the next morning so I went to the Hard Rock Café because it was close to my hotel, and I knew it would be quick and easy.
“Close, quick and easy” are all service characteristics. However, when I entered, I learned that this particular Hard Rock Café was the original restaurant, and the memorabilia all over the walls was incredible. Dinner lasted 30 minutes but I spent an hour touring the restaurant, buying a couple of extra beverages while I looked at all the memorabilia.
There are four different realms of experience: Education, Entertainment, Escapism and Esthetic (which differs from Aesthetic.)
Obviously a round of golf is an entertainment experience. It’s a game after all, and games are fun. But to truly make the shift from
delivering services to staging experiences, you have to consider how you can involve the other realms of experience into your offering. Certainly thirty years ago nobody had ever heard the term ‘edutainment’ but we know exactly what that is today, a blending of the education and entertainment realms of experience. Otherwise known as Shark Week.
particular part of the mountain, so that in my few minutes standing in line I wasn’t bored, I was engaged and learning about the history of the resort. Could you do something similar at your facility?
Of course, none of this was necessary 25 or 30 years ago. There was a time when all you had to do to impress your customers was what you said you were going to do, and that was enough. But now, experiences have replaced services as the pinnacle of customer engagement. People are looking for a little more, and those companies who fail to meet this demand are left with no other choice than to compete on price.
THE BOTTOM LINE
People are more interested in spending their money on experiences than goods. And when they do spend their hard earned money, and even harder earned time, they want to have time well spent, and they are willing to pay for it.
I realize that all of this might seem a little weird. I wouldn’t blame you if you wondered if this is really necessary. After all it’s golf, and shouldn’t that be enough? That all depends on whether or not you want to compete on price, or create experiences for your golfers.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that service isn’t important, as it certainly is important. I am simply saying that to differentiate yourself from your competition, you have to be willing to create something more. And you can accomplish this by committing to changing the customer, not the course. Perhaps you should consider that what you are doing isn’t weird enough?
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Did you ever go on a eld trip as a student? You can learn a lot in a classroom but nothing is as powerful as getting out and experiencing the lesson rst hand, which is known as Eduscapist – a blendingofeducationandescapism. Here are the four questions you should ask when you want to improve the experience:
1. How can I make it more fun? 2. What do I want people to
learn?
3. How can I transport my guest
from one sense of reality to an-
other?
4. What can I do to encourage my
guest to linger, and just be?
The golf course and clubhouse are the perfect stage for an incredible experience. It also gives you the chance to get creative. Let’s take the golf cart for example.
What can the golf cart become, other than a mode of transportation around the course? Can we create “games within games,” such as an obstacle course for players to drive through between holes? Can we put an onboard ordering system in place to request refreshments instead of having to wait for the refreshment cart to come by?
How about the clubhouse? Can it somehow be more than a lovely building with a restaurant and change rooms?
You can even get creative about the course itself. On a recent ski trip, I noticed that at every lift line there was a billboard explaining the history of that
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