Connecting with your customers/clientele in new ways
National Inventors Hall of Fame
During the opening months, when I was the President of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, OH, I wanted to get as much information as I could about the visitor experience and how we could continually tweak our environment, policies and programs to better engage our guests and create as much word of mouth as possible. We had phones placed around the building so that guests could, at any time, leave a message for our team with a compliment, complaint or just an idea to make the Hall of Fame a better place. We got great feedback and reviewed these ideas each week. I also spent much of my time roaming around the building observing guest interactions with our exhibits and team. One day as I was looking up our 5 story atrium at the glass elevator, I had an idea. I picked up one of the purple aprons which was standard garb for our frontline and volunteered to staff the elevator. I realized that this would be a great place to overhear guest responses to the look of the building, exhibit elements and the overall experience. I could ask any reasonable question I wanted to that could be answered in just 5 floors. The amount and richness of the data I collected proved to be invaluable as we worked every day to evaluate our successes and challenges and made the experience as compelling as possible. I was 
amused by one of the students who asked me as we traveled through the floors if I had been on the news being interviewed the previous night. I said I was. And he replied, “I just love a place that puts the elevator operator on TV”.
Where could you stand or what role in your organization could you temporarily play to get insights that you could not get by sitting in your office or in management meetings?
In my next blog posting, I’ll explore how Best Buy gets closer to their customers?
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Two similar experiences come to mind:
1) At Liberty Science Center, senior staff members pulled “Director on Duty” shifts on weekends and holidays. I typically spent most of my time hanging in the circular information desk fielding questions from customers. It helped with the evolution of our signage system and identified where our weaknesses were.
2) At The Computer Museum, I learned a lot about technology literacy by teaching our “Introduction to the Internet” hands-on classes in 1994 and by staffing our booth at MacWorld. Working a trade show booth is a great way to figure out how to say the most important things in the 20 seconds it takes someone to approach and walk by your booth.
Summary: if you want to know what customers think: go where they go to ask questions, ask the questions, and spend more time with the people who have the answers. They also know the questions that should be answered.