What does your customer feel when they park and enter your building? Are they given a warm welcome when they call? What a customer experiences while interacting in your space is important. It doesn’t matter if that’s a retail location or an office. Little details can impact that experience—positively and negatively. When building a brand, it is not a logo that makes this impact. It is the entire experience. Our discovery team learns about your organization. Our process for Customer Experience Design includes a site visit. We want to see your business as your customers see it.
How does your brand impact customer experience? The first step at id8 is to experience your brand as your customers do. We need to understand the journey customers take through your building. The culture, the dynamics between employees, how employees interact with customers – it’s all critical. We take this experience and create a strategy for how to improve the experience. We teach you how to integrate the brand into that experience.
Customer Experience Design In Signage and Branding
Signage design is a modest, yet important, extension of branding. Color scheme and font are often overlooked when creating signage. This creates a disconnect from your brand. Signage and branding should unify the building and brand, creating a sense of place. It should bring comfort to people and deliver an emotional response. This response should match the venue’s purpose, such as fun, serious, or hopeful.
A Customer Experience Design Case Study
For Daniell Middle School in Cobb County, we rebranded the entire school including the logo, colors, fonts, logo variations, and the mascot. With that came a significant color, theme, and style change. They transitioned from a playful light blue dolphin to a fierce black and gold yellow jacket named “JJ.”
Our first step was touring the school and taking a lot of pictures. The primary challenge was the floor tile that wasn’t going to change and had a lot of blue, plus the walls were painted blue and red…
We were excited to transform the school’s look and feel through signage opportunities and branding. It started at the road where there were 50-year old signs at the front entrance and exit. That was the first opportunity to change the brand and colors along with the customer experience. Then, we worked with the signage opportunities in the parking lot and the front covered entrance to the school. Our plan was extensive and even included recommendations for paint colors.
We designed pole banners in the parking lot, vinyl graphics on the glass and trusses at the entrance, directional signage for the front office, vinyl for the doors between grade levels, classroom door signs, and open walls where large spirit graphics for the yellow jacket could be placed. We came up with ways to welcome guests and also add color to an older institutional building. Fresh color, strategic logo, and mascot placement, and new murals added warmth and energy to overshadow the institutional painted block and tile floors. In addition, directional icons were created and placed strategically to guide guests.
Wayfinding: A functional extension of branding
Wayfinding refers to information systems that guide people through an environment. Successful wayfinding systems have signage design that represents the brand, as the brand experience and signage are connected. Wayfinding puts customers at ease when visiting your business. It allows them to know where to park, where to enter the building, and it gives a sense of confidence to first-time visitors.
What customers need from signage
Signage in an unfamiliar space provides visitors with understanding. Well-placed directional signs reduce stress and easy navigation boosts the consumers’ experience. This is especially true in complex environments, such as universities, large medical centers, and airports. id8 can help your business or location utilize Customer Experience Design, developing a good system to provide information consistently throughout all the key points in your space.
- Keep the signage design simple
- Remove any unnecessary information
- Retain brand identity with a consistent look and feel
- Mark key landmarks as needed to reinforce recognition
Research, testing, and proper execution of brand standards can lead to signs that stand the test of time. Therefore, your location signage can create a great customer experience and should not be an afterthought in the building and design process.
When customers walk into your business, what experience do you want them to have? We can help build a positive customer experience and would love to tour your space. Let’s schedule it!