Here's a new marketplace reality you should be adjusting to in your customer experience and customer service practices: Customers are coming together in unusual groupings and consuming travel, lodging, retail, foodservice, and entertainment in a big way.
This means that if you're only making your business comfortable for customers who do business with you as couples or in a "traditional" nuclear family, you're dangerously behind the times, my friend, and it's time to meet the new challenge head on.
For example, these groupings are a challenge to be met when designing restaurants, hotel room layouts and retail aisles. Christopher Hunsberger, Four Seasons Hotels And Resorts' EVP Global Products and Innovation, spoke with me recently about their newly opened (and exhaustively named) Four Seasons Resort Orlando at Walt Disney World Resort, which is the first luxury hotel right at the park. This new Four Seasons undertaking, being purpose-built from scratch, provided an opportunity for Hunsberger's company to come up with solutions to the challenges involved.
“Orlando is a market that many people visit along with extended multigenerational families. We accommodate that with multiple room configurations: We can put two rooms together. We can put four rooms together. We can put a whole floor together. We can put a half a floor together. You can have a section of a hotel and have it feel very private and very secluded to you.”
But it’s not all about being together, and this is important, says Hunsberger:
“We know that there are times when that multi-generational family wants to be together. There are times when they want to be able to separate from one another. So we have to respond to this: We have, for example, three very distinctly differently designed pool areas to accommodate multi-generational travel” during the times families want to be together, as well as the times they want to be apart.
Explorer Family Pool • Four Seasons Resort Orlando at Walt Disney World Resort • Photo credit: Four... [+]
Mayo Clinic, the extraordinary Rochester, Minnesota based hospital and healthcare organization, provides what can be called "destination medicine," as Leonard Berry terms it: the collaboration of experts from a range of specialties to provide diagnosis and treatment or a treatment plan for what are often very serious cases. Because coming to Rochester (or another of Mayo's locations) can be a family affair, and because the definition of family has been changing so quickly, Mayo designs its exam rooms to accommodate large, fluid groups of families and friends, including the commissioning of specially shaped sofas that work as chairs for one or two visitors or for half a dozen, if needed, depending on the number of loved ones visiting. All of this puts the patient—“the needs of the patient,” as Mayo’s motto puts it—at the center of the experience.
The central idea for a business to keep in mind when designing a customer experience or executing customer service is that your customer’s relationships with each other are central action. The relationship that matters is among your customers; the relationship between your customer and their service provider–you–is in a real sense secondary: it's a role for you of facilitation and support. If you provide a stage, a backdrop for the primary relationships of your customer, you can become, and remain, their provider of choice.
Demographics will support your business if you embrace this reality. Consider:
• There's an increase in single person households worldwide at all income levels, with the inevitable increase of single people forming alternative groupings (who may want to shop with you en masse).
• Millennials (born 1980-2000, Millennials are the largest generation in U.S. and world history) are traveling more with their parents than did previous generations.
• Four out of five U.S. households are not a “mom, dad and kids” family. Rather than take the nuclear family form, these households revolve around single-parent, multigenerational or rommmate-heavy configurations. One in four Asian-American households, for example, is multigenerational.
• More people are now "traveling for an interest or hobby, whether that’s salsa dancing or running a marathon," in the words of travel researcher Dr. Miguel Moital. "People increasingly seem to want to combine travel with their interest; they want to share, to learn, to improve their skills and they want to meet new people and see more of the world while they do so.” Dr. Moital's talking about groups of travelers/customers that are far more extended than the traditional Dad and son hunting expedition, or husband and wife having a candlelit dinner. He's talking about ballroom dancing, marathon running, religious outings, cultural pursuits that bring quite large and otherwise unaffiliated, or uniquely affiliated, people together.
Not to mention the literally impossible to overlook Red Hat Society women–or as The Simpsons memorably renamed them, “The Last of the Red Hat Mamas." These troupes of age 50+ women generally know each other in the course of their everyday or workaday lives; their meetups and events have benefited from the ease of internet-organized communication. They’re just one example of how it is a mistake to think that atypically linked groups of potential customers are solely a phenomenon of millennials and other young people.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, customer experience consultant, hospitality keynote speaker and the bestselling author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
