Not a news flash: the briefing world has changed in the last year and a half. More than ever, companies are calling for more and new ways to engage with customers beyond bringing them to a physical briefing center.
Briefing programs across the country are answering that call. They’re innovating and introducing new types of engagements and communication touch points that influence a wider portion of their customers’ journeys and add great value to their business.
Whether it’s enhancing a traditional, sales-driven opportunity or simply creating an offering that’s about relationship building or community outreach, there are many ways programs are distinguishing themselves by leveraging their specialized skill sets that they’ve developed over the years.
In our latest UpLevel Webinar, we heard examples from how industry leaders from Dell, AT&T and Microsoft are growing their offerings and are supporting a wider range of customer engagement types.
At Dell, they offer briefing agendas that are highly customized to each customer based on their objectives. For customers that can’t make it to one of their briefing centers, Dell brings the briefing to them with their extensive field briefing program.
Dell also recently launched an offering called Focused Briefings, which gives a group of customers individualized experiences. For example, all the customers might start together with the same keynote, but then customers are broken out into individual rooms with one-on-one, customized agendas.
“The value we bring is that each briefing is specific to each and every customer. So yes, we will do a larger group, but it’s mandatory that everyone’s breaking into their own one-on-one customized agendas.”
— Bonnie Bryce, Director of Strategic Programs, Executive Briefing programs at Dell.
Programs are also leveraging specialized regional and site-based resources to offer a broader portfolio of experiences and focused engagements.
At AT&T and Microsoft, each of their centers have different offerings that are strategically based on their customers’ objectives.
AT&T’s center in Bedminster, New Jersey is the home for one of eight global network operation centers, as well as security operation centers. That location is used for a lot of deep dive engagements on network management, monitoring, and disaster recovery.
Their flagship center in Dallas has access to all the AT&T executives, making that location ideal for thought leadership and offerings more suited for C-level, high-touch engagements that utilize various experiential offerings, interactive kiosks, and demonstrations on trending technologies, all working together to tell the AT&T story. Other AT&T offerings include multi-customer events and advisory councils that all fall within the experiential marketing team.
At Microsoft, their executive briefing center at their Redmond, WA headquarters is the highest level of customer engagement they offer, with experiences geared mostly toward the C-level of their largest accounts. Adjacent to that is the Industry Experience Center – a 25,000 sf warehouse that houses industry relevant immersive experiences. Microsoft also offers an extensive field program which is used for the very technical engagements, working with customers to solve a specific business challenge. The field program also engages their customers through proof of concept, hackathons and design thinking sessions.
Microsoft also scales their program to centers across the globe. “We opened our first experience center in Singapore two years ago, with a full-functioning technology center,” explained Dave Rogers, Director of Global Operations, Microsoft Customer Experience. “So that’s our way of scaling some of those experiences to customers that wouldn’t ever be able to come to a briefing in Redmond.”
Between Dell, AT&T and Microsoft, those are great examples of how programs have expanded to add offerings outside of the typical EBC scope. Other ideas could include:
- Technical solutions reviews
- Multi-client briefings
- Field briefings
- Account Maintenance and QBRs
- On-demand and self serve experiences
Every engagement is an opportunity to impact the business. And when you create different kinds of engagements, you increase and UpLevel those opportunities. If you want more guidance on how you can expand your program’s offering portfolio, let’s chat, we’re full of ideas.