It’s been said that Walt Disney World is the happiest place on earth. To me, a happy place is where I can pick money off of trees, not have it exit my bank account like thousands of bees flying at warp speed.
But when it comes to the customer experience, Disney World may very well be the happiest place on earth. And their content has a lot to do with it.
Here are a few takeaways from Disney’s content.
Disney nails the mobile experience with timely content
While weaving our way through parks, the My Disney Experience mobile app was always at the ready. That’s because the app is highly useful for maximizing your time during the day.
And time is of the essence. It’s one thing to clown around at your neighborhood park and wonder where the time went. But for my family, this was a trip of trips. We may never return, so let’s squeeze every ounce out of this puppy like a Florida orange.
You can see wait times
Standing, walking, and stopping to enjoy an attraction at Disney World is the norm. It’s like Wait Disney World. (Pun nailed.)
But with the app, geolocation allows you to see precisely where you are in the park and the wait times for all of the attractions around you. The listed wait times were highly accurate, so we could make good judgments on whether to trek across the park for a ride, or hit an attraction quickly before our FastPass window was up.
You can order food
Getting food in the park favors the app user. While people wait in lines, you can find your dining option, order on the way, and have your food ready at the mobile order pickup line when you arrive. Just don’t order a rack of ribs in the middle of the day like I did. #HurtDisneyWorld
You can make a plan
Once you have your FastPasses in place, you can plan your day around them. You can set reminders for shows and keep track of any appointments or reservations you’ve made. It’s easy to add and delete items too as your plans change.
Content lesson: Empower your user to have the most efficient experience possible while using your platform. It’s OK if they spend less time on your app if it creates a better customer experience.
Disney uses content to minimize boredom in the line
It’s hard to beat Disney’s FastPass+ system when it comes to the customer experience. You walk toward the ride entrance, see the miserable, serpentine mass of humanity winding around the park, approach the gate, swipe your Magic Band, and breezily stroll past 7,000 people to the gate of the ride. It’s a hero’s moment.
Buuuuttt, you do miss some of the cool stuff Disney throws on the walls of the standby line to keep people from impatience-induced conniptions.
Stuff to read
Waiting for Expedition Everest isn’t bad at all. When you arrive at the attraction, you enter a world of a Nepalese ski lodge where it’s obvious the menacing Yeti is the star of local lore. While waiting, you have time to read things like newspaper clippings of Yeti sightings and a summary of indigenous animals with a helpful image key to identify their scat. That’s exactly the kind of crap I want to see.
Content lesson: If your customer has to endure a fairly long experience, like a survey or opening an account, find ways to reward them throughout the process to keep them engaged.
Stuff to look at
One of the best places to wait for a ride is Toy Story Land in Hollywood Studios. Both the Slinky Dog Dash and Toy Story Mania attractions feature enlarged toys and kids’ things, like Elmer’s glue and Crayola Crayons, which contain the actual product verbiage on those packages, which I never read before! This captured my imagination and made me feel like toy in a kid’s room, which didn’t get chewed up by a dog, which is exactly the experience they wanted to create.
Content lesson: While the content itself is vital, pay attention to the surrounding details where the content lives. Thoughtful content design will delight your customers and keep them coming back.
Stuff to play with
At Thunder Mountain Railroad in Magic Kingdom, there are lots of little surprises of things to do while you wait. You can push down a lever to blow up some dynamite, or spin a wheel to blow air on yourself. Yes, it’s quite the germ fest for your fingers, but distracts you from noticing yourself wilting like a daisy in the Floridian heat.
Content lesson: Timely, interactive content brings delight to the customer experience. If you can fit a little game or quiz or calculation into your content, and reward the customer with information they were looking for, you’ve won.
So go be like Disney
While Disney delivers the ultimate customer experience, their content isn’t world-beating. It’s just thoughtful and useful. So find ways to weave great content into your CX, be it offering simple instructions for snappy task accomplishment or something interactive that offers a payoff.
If we can learn from Disney’s content experience, we can ensure our CX isn’t Mickey Mouse.
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