Why the Experience Matters
We are just settling back in from our week long trip to DC and as a family who love history, art, and good food, we were in heaven. As a business owner, I spent this morning reflecting on that trip as I edited our photos and the one thing that stuck out was that how you experience something will often cloud your opinion of it. Often times the end product may not be enough to bring someone back if the experience was horrible.
The Coffee Experience
After getting settled in our hotel, we took a walk around the area we were staying in and decided to stop in a coffee shop called Pret, just three blocks north of the White House. Nothing really stood out at first until we went to place an order. The barista was smiling and chatty in a way that you could tell he cared about his customers. He informed us that the pastries were made fresh every day in the kitchen downstairs and then proceeded to hand us already warm cookies from the display. As he passed my Chai to me, he also passed a smaller sample cup to my husband because he hadn’t ordered a drink and wanted him to experience their organic tea as well. It was a wholly different experience than going to a normal chain coffee shop. Even if the drinks had been average, I would have come back for that experience. We went back twice every day while we were there and each time, the experience was just as good and the drinks were always perfectly amazing. When you are the little guy competing is a sea of over saturation, how will you stand out? I think that when you provide a good experience followed by a great product, you have a customer for life. How do your customers experience your business? Is it making them a customer for life or training them to feel like a photographer is a photographer is a photographer?
