Russian novelist and master storyteller Leo Tolstoy once wisely pinpointed the key challenge in bringing about change: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

To facilitate effective change, as opposed to ineffectual quick fixes, you must create a sense of urgency about the need for it.

Change often comes from the middle, not from leadership. In my work, I’ve learned that the most effective change agents possess two key traits: the people skills of a politician and the persuasive skills of a lawyer. To get your team to truly mobilize you must gather evidence and present findings. You also have to bring them together and rally them. Changing your approach to customer experience requires that you align the team around the mission. Almost surely, they are not fully aligned as of now.

EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE MUST MOVE TO THE C SUITE

Who owns the customer experience? Who’s responsible for ensuring a brand promise’s delivery and consistency throughout the journey?

Starbucks, Zappos, Sephora, and a growing number of companies employ a person responsible for this. His or her title ranges from chief digital officer to chief customer officer to chief innovation officer, and these all share a common focus: to deliver a desired experience across every channel and every screen and at every step during the customer lifecycle. And they’ve organized once-disparate teams into one integrated cross-functional department responsible for a consistent experience across all physical and digital touch-points.

GIVE ME A GRANDE CUP OF EXPERIENCE

Starbucks is one of the brands that gets it. The company could focus on simply delivering drinks to customers. Instead, Starbucks studies and optimizes the relationship between customers and baristas beyond the transaction. Consider how Starbucks describes this experience on its “About Page” at www.starbucks.com:

It’s just a moment in time—just one hand reaching over the counter to present a cup to another outstretched hand. But it’s a connection. We make sure everything we do honors that connection—from our commitment to the highest quality coffee in the world, to the way we engage with our customers and communities to do business responsibly.

Customers form a personal connection with the brand where experience becomes a catalyst for ritual visitation. That is the kind of customer loyalty all brands must be striving for.

In mid-2012, the company appointed Adam Brotman, formerly senior vice president of Starbucks Digital Ventures, to an entirely new executive role: chief digital officer. ¹ He is now in charge of all of Starbucks’ digital projects, including web, mobile, social media, digital marketing, Starbucks Card and loyalty, e-commerce, wi-fi, Starbucks Digital Network, and emerging in-store technologies. In discussing his new role with CNET, he explained,

Digital has been an essential part of how we build our brand and connect with our customers . . . there’s been such a seismic shift in our interactions with customers that we needed to pull it all together and make it a priority.

This is an approach that has only become more substantive and critical over time. In our work together over the years, Brotman has shared not only the focus of his work, but also how experiences have forced how the company works inside. Models change. Roles change. Metrics evolve.

Starbucks isn’t alone in its focus on creating an exceptional customer experience (CX). Disney, Nordstrom, Warby Parker, Uber, Virgin America, Zappos—these brands are all working hard to elevate customer experiences. You should be doing so, too.

GET THEM TO THINK DIFFERENTLY

All of this requires getting your team to ask some key questions about the way you’ve been operating:

1. WHY DO WE DO THINGS THE WAY WE ALWAYS HAVE?

2. WHY CAN’T WE TRY SOMETHING NEW OR DIFFERENT?

3. WHAT IF WE STOPPED ASSUMING HOW THE CUSTOMER THINKS AND ACTS AND LEARNED HOW IT’S DIFFERENT FROM WHAT WE KNOW?

4. WHAT IF WE STARTED A NEW INITIATIVE TO BRING TOGETHER DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS THAT CATER TO CUSTOMERS TO BETTER LEARN HOW TO SERVE THEM WHILE COMPLEMENTING THE EXPERIENCE WE EACH IMPART?

5. MAYBE WE COULD START BY THINKING DIFFERENTLY FROM THE ONSET BY NOT BUILDING UPON WHAT WE HAVE BUT INSTEAD STARTING FROM SCRATCH?

6. WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF WE TRIED TO FIND WAYS TO BE MORE RELEVANT AND TRIED TO DESIGN MORE HUMAN AND DESIRED EXPERIENCES FOR CUSTOMERS EVERY STEP OF THE WAY? HOW MUCH CAN WE GAIN OR WIN BY EXPERIMENTING AND INNOVATING OUR APPROACH, PROCESSES, AND INVESTMENTS TO DESIGN EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES?

7. WHAT’S THE RISK OR COST OF NOT TRYING TO BE RELEVANT? HOW MUCH DO WE LOSE NOW AND OVER TIME? WHERE WILL CUSTOMERS GO INSTEAD?

To begin answering these questions you must all go through your customer experience journey and experience all the moments of truth just as they do.

Empathy is a fountain of innovation.

BUILDING A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

To design remarkable and delightful experiences takes a strong foundation. Said nicely, you have some housecleaning to do. Fortunately, a good game plan for getting started has been created.

Teletech’s Sean Carithers shared with me a basic plan of action, organized by main issues (challenges/opportunities):

1. Data

2. Analytics

3. Insights

4. Actions

5. Outcomes

The template provided for you here is merely a sample. Your issues—and what and how you address them—should be based on your own research and address your own business objectives and priorities. But this is a good template for getting started.

DEVELOPING A PLAN OF ACTION

CHALLENGES

1. Increasing global competition

2. Pricing & margin pressures

3. Market fragmentation & complexity

4. Customers defection

5. Siloed data

6. Outdated operational processes

7. Organizational barriers

8. Privacy concerns

DATA

What? Assemble a wide range of data assets at the customer level.

How? Identify the right data to develop the necessary insights.

ANALYTICS

What? Insights through a combination of analytical expertise, advanced quantitative techniques, and new technologies.

How? Using a broad spectrum of analytical tools and market tested approaches to identify significant business impact.

INSIGHTS

What? Actionable insights to drive improved customer lifetime value.

How? Using a broad range of industry experience to generate significant & sustained business value.

ACTIONS

What? Right data driven actions at the right time.

How? Embed our analytic solutions into automated, repeatable processes at scale.

OUTCOMES

1. Expand market share

2. Enhanced cost & margin advantage

3. Differentiated strategies

4. Customer loyalty

5. Enterprise data repository

6. Leading-edge systems & processes

7. Organizational realignment

8. Fully compliant privacy policies

GET YOUR DATA HOUSE IN ORDER

Data points are collected inconsistently, putting cracks in the foundation for its future use. Data represents the key to unlocking new customer behaviors and preferences, but existing infrastructures and processes lack a support model to gather and distribute actionable insights to key stakeholders. Big data will always remain big until you can analyze and present it in meaningful and actionable ways—at a high-level view and specific to the role each group plays in leading the customer journey, experience, and lifecycle.

Data must always tell a story. Traditionally, no one is held accountable for measuring and integrating insights—or, how well they perform. Data doesn’t have a home or a group that is empowered to deliver those insights to stakeholders and decision makers.

Now is the time to form a data collection and insights team that is privy to all digital efforts where customer data is collected. This will allow you to ensure that feedback loops are in place throughout the journey and that information is subsequently centralized, analyzed, and distributed accordingly. At the same time, companies must establish a reporting process to stakeholder groups.

According to Teradata, the following key set of questions will help to make certain the right data is collected, interpreted, and shared for each moment of truth:

1.  What is the right experience for this individual customer?

2.  How should I tailor different channel interactions for the customer?

3.  What is the best way to service this customer, in this context, on this screen?

4.  Is this customer in the market to buy?

5.  Which product is best for the customer?

6.  What is the right offer to get the customer to repurchase?

7.  (Extra credit) How can we invest in the “own” side of the equation to promote a wonderful experience for the life of the product?

8.  (Double extra credit) What are the ways we can promote the sharing of wonderful experiences to spark connections between the Ultimate and First Moments of Truth (UMOT = ZMOT) and the micro-experiences that connect them?

PROVIDE UNIFIED CUSTOMER CARE

Even though everyone owns customer experience—or at least should—no one owns the relationship between customer behaviors or the experiences that define them. Depending on which group customers talk to, they are only exposed to a sliver of what a company could offer to them.

Some businesses are rethinking the role of customer care, introducing new programs that promote care throughout the customer lifecycle. They start by integrating marketing, support, and CRM systems to make connections between touch-points, business units, and customer expectations.

Here, Teletech suggests assembling a unified customer care map of best practices. Again, this is a template that you can and should customize based on your needs. Your experience architecture work may lead you to find some of these items a bit too traditional for your connected customers, and innovation is optimal, but in the beginning of the process this list of best practices, assembled by Teletech, sets a good baseline for improvement:

DATA AND ANALYTICS

360-degree view of the customer

Customer interaction based on analysis

Predictive forecasting and response using social media

Real-time customer sentiment

Voice of the customer unified for true customer experience

ORGANIZATIONAL READINESS

Collaborative knowledge management

Gamification as a learning tool

Real-time agent feedback

Simulated learning

Visual management with real-time metrics

PROCESS OPTIMIZATION

Cross-channel integration with callback technology

Forecasting and scheduling solutions for blended multichannel

More complex issues as self-service increases

Virtual agents

Empowered user-engagement

Tech and speech analytics

STRATEGY AND VISION

Call center as a strategic asset for retention and cross-sell

Meeting customers where they want to interact

Needs-based customer segmentation

Similar feel across all interactions

TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE

Adaptive technology

Cloud

Intelligent agent desktop

Multichannel mobility

Simplified authentication

Teletech also shared its “Five Levels of the Agent–Customer Workflow” as an added step in planning for customer engagement:

1. Engage: Assess the multichannel enablers where customers engage with the contact center (IVR, email, chat, social, and so on).

2. Identify: Customer profile and history are used to identify your customers (CTI, interaction management, CRM).

3. Solve: Systems that help solve the customer’s inquiries (knowledge management, product catalog, order management).

4. Influence: Proactive solutions and cross-sell, up-sell opportunities (customer data, BI/analytics).

5. Measure: Review the areas for measuring contact center and metrics (call dispositioning, CSAT, NPS or shared experience value [SEV] reporting).

Lastly on this front, conduct a customer journey/experience health-check against your future state, not necessarily against current goals, to surface challenges, gaps, and opportunities. Outline system/channel and any associated platforms and supporting metrics that contribute to the customer experience or the state of it. Including the basics should also help you identify what channels/touch-points you’re missing to close the experience divide. Ideally, you should establish your own benchmark and scoring system. And again, it’s crucial to conduct a health-check against the future state—not what is in place today. Executives are more ready to support you if there’s
a sense of urgency in light of a low or missing score.

IMPROVE TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS TO EMPOWER EMPLOYEES AND BETTER SERVE CUSTOMERS

Strategists across functions are drawn to the latest “shiny object” technologies, rather than selecting technology solutions that solve problems and create opportunities. Thinking digital first is a solution, but not all that’s required. Strategists must carefully assess technology’s role in the customer journey, behavior, and expectations prior to making technology investments to improve the journey as it exists today.

It seems that people are beginning to understand that technology shouldn’t be the chief catalyst in developing strategies. At the same time, companies let legacy systems influence important decisions when considering how they can play a role in transformation—even if current systems are not the right solution for delivering a desired digital customer experience.

Companies must instead pursue a top-down approach of understanding the desired CX and then aligning the supporting technologies. To assess existing and new technologies, understand the gap, and begin to develop a roadmap for CX improvement, Teletech suggests that you ask six key questions:

1. What is the desired experience I want people to feel and share in every stage of the journey?

2.  How do I create a unified, frictionless customer experience across multiple channels?

3. How do I leverage customer data across multiple channels to provide personalized offerings and services to my customers?

4. How do I optimize my customer interaction technologies to empower
my employees to better serve the customer?

5.  How do I effectively manage cloud and legacy systems to improve customer service?

6. How do I reduce my cost to serve my customers and deliver good customer experience? Or how do I spend smarter, regardless of cost, to improve the experience and increase volume and margin (i.e., “think different” like Apple)?

While it’s critical to see the value in these best practices, it’s best to think of this process as just a model for adapting, and not to treat it as law. The work described in the coming chapters for evaluating and recrafting your customer experience is going to prompt you to see things in ways that push the boundaries a good deal further on what your customer experience is and could be. You can’t destroy what exists overnight, nor can you rebuild it in short order. But no land is designed for tomorrow without building a flexible and scalable grid to support it. So the next step is to reimagine the grid on which your current experience plays out.

To reshape the Circle of Rife into the Circle of Trust takes engineering. The path between ZMOT and UMOT and the micro-experiences or moments that connect them today is outdated. Even though customers are changing or different, these roads were constructed by generations before today’s digital nomads. These journeys are largely paved with analog-first bricks, and they are now decaying, limiting the speed and ease with which customers can travel and taking away from the overall pleasure of the voyage. Not only that, but many connecting roads are missing.

As an experience architect you can go one of two ways: you can either build upon these paths, because they’re based on elements with which everyone is already familiar, or you can build new roads that connect us from a new Point A to X, that accommodate not only today’s devices but also those that do not yet exist. That’s both the challenge and the opportunity of experience architecture.

We’re in a period of qualitative change in the ways we can engage customers. An evolutionary transformation is proceeding. What’s required to keep up is somewhat akin to the changes in transportation engineering required by the advent of automobiles.

When designers envisioned a means of transport without horses, they at first worked within the existing framework of roads developed for horse-drawn carriages. The early steam-powered automobiles released to the public in the mid-1850s ¹ were incredible feats of engineering, creating an entirely new way to move people around. Yet their creative inspiration for designing these newfangled motor vehicles was carriages, and so they resembled carriages, which is why they were called horseless carriages. As new roads were built to accommodate them, they were in turn initially patterned after the stone, brick, and dirt roadways that carriages traversed dating back thousands of years. It took inventors and architects decades to challenge convention and reinvent automobiles and roadways that were more effective and efficient. Transportation then thrived because the infrastructure was reimagined for a new generation of commuters.

The digital and real-world paths for customers to travel with your company were similarly built based on the roads they traveled using old-fashioned technology. The key difference between now and then is that customers now have the wherewithal to build or choose their own roads that either lead to or away from you. In order to draw them to you and keep them with you, you must now identify the gaps between:

What connected customers actually value as opposed to what you think they value

How someone behaves online and in the real world in contrast to what you designed for them to do

What you think they want to do versus what they can ultimately do with a little inventiveness

The quality of engagement and experience that pulls customers together into a community you create and what makes you trusted and your customers loyal, and even fervent, rather than the techniques that reluctantly lock customers into relationships with you

Extending the transportation metaphor, I’d like to visit the science of transportation engineering. This will help you rethink the nature of the thruways that will bring customers to you over and over without friction and with delight.

Why transportation engineering? First, because my father is a twice-retired transportation engineer in Southern California. Every time we talk, I get to hear about the interesting work he does to keep his city moving and the challenges he faces in doing so. Our conversations have inspired me to think of customer journey mapping and experience creation in a similar way.

The purpose of transportation engineering ² is to optimize and enhance the movement of goods and people using everything from highways to water, railways, subway, air, and pipelines. In customer experience architecture, we also have many system components: smart phones, tablets, PCs, gaming consoles, kiosks, and popular online channels, including social media, apps, websites and landing pages, QR codes, email, wearable technologies, smart watches, the Internet of Everything (smart cars, watches, clothing, cameras, thermostats, refrigerators, etc.) and whatever’s next. Then there’s still broadcast media, TV, radio, and print. There’s also real-world signage, call centers, email, and good-old-fashioned face-to-face human engagement.

Optimizing the customer experience with this souped-up system requires rethinking your transportation infrastructure and the equivalent of moving from stone roads to highways. You don’t have to tear down all that exists, at least not at first. After all, traditional customers still exist. But you must at a minimum improve it, connect it, and breathe new life into it. That means plotting new courses and testing new paths and cross-screen experiences. I’m not asking you to tear up all of the current roads. I’m asking you to reengineer and build new roads, rules, and systems with your connected customer in mind. And these new roads must be qualitatively different from the old ones; they must be roads of the future. While your traditional customers drive on the existing roads in their horseless carriages, your connected customers want to race along on new kinds of grids as if they were on TRON LightCycles—moving in directions and speeds that defy physics and convention.

THE GRID: A DIGITAL FRONTIER

As I think about experience architecture and designing the micro-experiences of the new customer journey, three movies come to mind: TRON, The Matrix, and Inception. Each featured the design of whole new worlds, and each also put notable focus on characters in the role of architect.

Each of the worlds created were based on a grid of sorts, not unlike those used in urban planning, game creation, and software development. The grid template serves as the framework for the planning and construction of a digital society. You can think of such a grid as the framework for designing digital experiences—for creating a new world that allows your customers to move freely and naturally at their own will.

Mark Boulton, a typographic designer living in south Wales, once said, “Well designed grid systems can make your designs not only more beautiful and legible, but more usable.” ³ I’d like to bring grid thinking to your work in experience architecture.

In graphic design, grids are used to provide a solid visual and structural balance. ⁴ The grid system in graphic design is a way of organizing content on a page. It will also help you connect all of the micro-experiences you want to create. And with a grid, anything is possible. It just takes imagination to bring something immersive to life.

To craft a new customer journey system grid, you must first map out your current grid.

DOCUMENT WHAT IS TO VISUALIZE NEW POSSIBILITIES

In 1982, public transit in Portland, Oregon was completely transformed due to the rollout of a frequent bus line grid. It set the stage for the 1986 debut of the MAX light rail system (LRT). Without the insights provided by the bus line grid, travelers would likely still be forced to travel downtown on the LRT in order to get between two points far away from it, say both on the eastside. ⁵ The image here outlines the grid network of bus routes in 1970.

The problem was that the grid wasn’t optimized to move people around the city. For one thing, it was designed primarily to get people to downtown. It was also overly complicated, with a lot of unnecessary overlapping, zigzagging, and inefficient routes.

In 1982, the network was redrawn to enable people to travel more directly anywhere they wanted to go. ⁶ The new grid represented a radical but effective simplification over its predecessor. The design intentionally helped people remember the network without having to carry a map.

Jarret Walker, author of Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives, ⁷ observed the cultural significance of the 1982 grid to the city of Portland:

The new grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland’s livability objectives. This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years—from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail—has sprouted and thrived most successfully . . . The MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.

As you consider your grid, remember that you are not solving for everything right now. A good place to start is examining the routes in place today, their strengths and weaknesses, and also which modes of transportation and ideal routes are missing.

1970 Grid Network of Bus Routes

Redrawn 1982 Network

THE GRID HELPS YOU DESIGN NEW WORLDS AND EXPERIENCES

In order to think about the true potential for transformation, let’s get our geek on for a moment. TRON is one of my favorite movies of all time. ⁸ In the movie, the Grid represents a virtual world that both the in-movie gamer characters and movie viewers are immersed in.

For those who haven’t seen the original 1982 TRON or its sequel released in 2010, TRON: Legacy, much of the movie takes place within a software program, the Grid. Kevin Flynn, the main protagonist, is a fictional software engineer who had in his time designed some of the world’s bestselling video games for corporate giant ENCOM.

In the first film, Kevin is purposely digitized by the software’s defense mechanism to prevent him from accessing key files. In the software world, he becomes part of a gaming culture where he must compete for his life against other virtual players in the Grid.

The Grid is vast yet finite. It represents a fully functioning city complete with transportation, boundaries, and rules in place to govern citizens, the roles each play, and how they can and can’t move around within this city.

The Grid was described by Disney ⁹ this way:

Hidden away inside a computer, exists another world. Its creator designed it for games, but it became so much more. He called it The Grid, a digital utopia filled with infinite possibilities.

Think of the Grid as the framework for recrafting customer experience.

Experience architecture does in fact start with a grid. In experience architecture you are designing a virtual world or ecosystem bound by similar engineering parameters and then enlivened by your vision. Take a look at this London Underground map reenvisioned as a TRON LightCycle grid. It was designed by SF-based artist (and dear friend) Krystal Lauk and was inspired by a graphic originally created by “iamclu.” ¹⁰ This map might well represent the journey map your customers travel today. If you were to plot paths as designed between Point A (awareness) and Point X (experience), you’d no doubt uncover broken tracks and/or antiquated or dilapidated stations as well as opportunities for better, more connected or desired routes. You would also find that to serve today’s customer, you’ll need new services and new stops and amenities.

The London Underground as a TRON LightCycle Grid

YOUR GRID: DESIGNING A DIGITAL METROPOLIS

Today, your customer journey is represented not by a grid, but by a series of disparate maps, each owned by groups within the organization. The maps, if they’re even visualized, are the equivalent of looking at layouts of rooms within a house without having a holistic view of the entire home. Therefore the design and function of each is done in isolation, deprived of a unified view to improve and optimize the function and harmony of a household.

By thinking about experiences from an architecture perspective, TRON’s Grid represents an intentional design that brings together rules, modes of transportation, transportation engineering, and other urban planning elements that ensure symmetry, purpose, and function.

Your grid consists of all things customer facing and also the systems behind the scenes to ensure integration and congruency for a unified experience. It maximizes existing touch-points, introduces new engagement opportunities, defines new paths, enhances multiscreening, and simply connects the dots. It is the blueprint for the creation of all of your customers’ micro-experiences. This becomes a blueprint for the creation of all of your customers’ micro-experiences, an experience flow, the path designed to shape and steer desired experiences based on the context, intentions, and aspirations of the customer.

Constructing a new grid is making an official statement to the market that you are not forcing customers to travel decrepit roads and routes to accomplish their goals.

Inspired by the Grid, I visualized how different paths must be re-engineered for connected customers.

The grid and your work will bring together the worlds of brand experience (BX), CX, and UX to integrate what is disconnected today and to bring to life a more meaningful experience:

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE + R&D

Listening

Big data

Customer collaboration

Experience divide

Shared experiences (UMOT)

Feedback loop

INSIGHTS

Customer journey mapping

Customer efficiency/effort mapping

Behaviors and expectations

Shared experiences

Digital bread crumbs

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Product and technology roadmapping

Scope + design

Development

Product marketing

Experience metrics

CONTEXTUAL MARKETING

Content marketing

Website

Applications

Social

Mobile

Advertising

Microsite/landing pages

SEO/SEM

PR

Email

Performance

Attribution

SALES

Demonstrations

Promotions

Trial

Consultation

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Personalization

Knowledge center/help desk

Call center

Social

Email

Live

LOYALTY/REWARDS

NPS

Trust

Effort

Gamification

Reviews

Rewards

CRM

Customer journey management

Shared experience reinforcement

The grid is your metropolis for your digital customer experience, the journey and the resulting experience. It is the chief city of your digital world and it is where your customers live, visit, interact, and wander. Like anything involved with transformation, it’s complicated.

To take a look at the future and consider just how much more engaging and rich an experience grid you can construct, let’s visit the other movie that experience architecture makes me think of, Inception, and the mindblowing world it created.

THE WORLDS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

Released in 2010, Inception is a science-fiction action thriller film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, and Michael Caine. It is set in a futuristic world where certain people can enter the dreams of others and extract information or ideas ¹¹ that were otherwise secret. The film’s leading character, Dom Cobbs (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), is a dream thief who is the leading specialist in corporate espionage but also wanted by the law for his intellectual embezzlement. In the movie, Cobbs is offered a chance of redemption as payment for a task considered to be impossible, the opposite of extraction—instead, “inception.” Rather than steal ideas, he’s tasked with the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.

Much of the movie takes place in varying dream states. Like TRON, Inception requires an architect to construct the dream space in which the dreamers interact. As with the Grid, the dream states are rich with aesthetic and tactile details, ¹² which ensures that the dream world feels real, safe, and familiar. The architect must design this world to be so comfortable that each subject who enters the dream space then fills it with personal details from his or her own subconscious and memories. This is how Cobb is able to discover the valuable secrets that he sells for profit.

As in Inception’s dream world, customers fill in each encounter with your grid with elements of who they are along with their intentions, expectations, and desired outcomes. You can’t completely control what they do or think; but you can create a familiar and even aspirational environment for them to roam around freely and explore.

As of now, instead of creative experience architecture, most companies architect transactions. Rather than create worlds, we reinforce brands. Instead of providing space where people can become part of our brand ecosystem, we offer the equivalent of drab suburbs full of prefabricated homes. But as Cobb says in Inception, we have “the chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed. Things that couldn’t exist in the real world.”

You must begin building an experiential ecosystem in which people can explore, discover, thrive, and connect. You establish the rules, design the aesthetics and atmosphere, optimize decision making, and facilitate engagement, transaction, and relationships.

This takes design. And the better, more thoughtful, and more personal the design, the more meaningful the experience.