of its O’Hare Airport garage with icons of different Chicago sports franchises—the Bulls on one floor, the White Sox on another, and so forth. And each level has its own signature song wafting through it. “You never forget where you parked,” one Chicago resident remarked, which is precisely the experience a traveler wants after returning from a week of travel.
Eliminate negative cues.
Ensuring the integrity of the customer experience requires more than the layering on of positive cues. Experience stagers also must eliminate anything that diminishes, contradicts, or distracts from the theme. Most constructed spaces—malls, offices, buildings, or airplanes—are littered with meaningless or trivial messages. While customers sometimes do need instructions, too often service providers choose an inappropriate medium or message form. For example, trash bins at fast-food facilities typically display a “Thank You” sign. True, it’s a cue to customers to bus their own trays, but it also says, “No service here,” a negative reminder. Experience stagers might, instead, turn the trash bin into a talking, garbage-eating character that announces its gratitude when the lid swings open. Customers get the same message but without the negative cue, and self- busing becomes a positive part of the eating experience.
The easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service—thus creating a memorable encounter of the unpleasant kind. “Overservicing” in the name of customer intimacy can also ruin an experience. Airline pilots interrupt customers who are reading, talking, or napping to announce, “Toledo is off to the right side of the aircraft.” At hotels, front-desk personnel interrupt face-to-face conversations with guests to field telephone calls. In the guestrooms, service reminders clutter end tables, dressers, and desktops. (Hide them away and housekeeping will replace these annoyances the next morning.) Eliminating negative cues—by transmitting pilots’ offhand announcements through headsets instead of speakers, by assigning off-stage personnel to answer phones, and by placing guest information on an interactive television channel—creates a more pleasurable customer experience.