Executive Briefing Centers have evolved. They’re no longer places where people sit through generic corporate presentations; they’ve become interactive and engaging Customer Experience Centers, equipped with interactive displays and immersive brand experiences.
The reason that Executive Briefing Centers have endured is that they offer a distinct benefit. Briefing Centers create a unique space for sharing a vision with the customer – and today, this process is much more collaborative. Instead of preaching to a passive audience, Briefing Centers have adapted; they enable customers to co-define their needs and explore ways that your company can fulfill them.
There’s also the age-old problem of communicating value to customers – and a Briefing Center is designed to do that. And, with today’s technology, Executive Briefing Centers and Customer Experience Centers are better than ever at communicating value using a wide array of cutting-edge technologies.
How briefing centers and customer experience centers communicate value?
Before jumping in and investing in new technologies for your Briefing Center, it’s worth defining what makes a briefing center uniquely successful at communicating value.
Hint: it’s not a generic slideshow presentation.
A modern Executive Briefing Center is designed around a customer-centric model of communication. Every element should be about how their situation is improved with your product or service. Yes, of course, you should go into the specifics of your offer at the right moment – but primarily, you need to demonstrate that you ‘get’ their needs using digital storytelling.
By demonstrating the benefits to the customer first, you’ll ensure that this becomes the context for each additional piece of information they learn as they progress through the Briefing Center experience. This lays the foundation for linking your brand values with their own and showing how you’re a good match on multiple levels.
The latest technology for executive briefing centers
A modern Executive Briefing Center will contain multiple technologies to enhance the experience and deepen understanding. There is a bewildering choice of technology on the market already, so let’s look at how these can generate value for the Briefing Center experience.
Customer-centric
Staying customer-centric means offering a personalized experience supported by digital storytelling software for specific profiles. Participants can be equipped with RFID tags that track their journey and identify them based on proximity or scanning the tag. QR codes on a name tag or identification via an NFC-equipped smartphone can also offer the same personalized experience, linking with CRM data.
Dedicated apps can also create a unique experience and offer the possibility to continue the interaction after the event. Thinking of using facial recognition? This technology is now becoming more widely available, but use it wisely – most people find it a little creepy when personalization goes too far.
Immersive
A huge trend in Briefing Centers is immersive experiences. You can form strong memories and connect to ideas. Digital storytelling software can help create and deploy customized experiences for customer groups (see ‘customer-centric’ above), and it’s the technical foundation for an immersive experience room. Without this software, it would be a bunch of dark screens.
Immersive experiences can also be more compact than this, including large screens, 3D holograms, augmented reality (AR) experiences and virtual reality (VR) experiences. VR has its issues, however, as the headsets are still heavy and tend to ‘lag,’ so they can only be used for short periods. Better headsets will offer more realistic experiences using lighter designs in the future – but we’re not there yet.
Interactive
By interacting with digital stories, your customer can select narratives and learn which solutions they find most compelling. This might differ from what you expect or want to sell – but it can tell you a lot about your customer. It also means you don’t have to ‘guess’ which concepts are most relevant.
Interactivity can be brought to a Briefing Center with sensor-triggered displays, gesture control, digital signage, interactive signage, touch-capable screens, and non-linear storytelling. Non-linear storytelling is another thing that professional digital storytelling software can support by serving content in the order demanded. This enables a more customized experience through direct or vicarious interaction (via an interlocutor who facilitates).
Digital storytelling
This component is a must for any Briefing Center or Customer Experience Center. Digital storytelling technology enables companies to communicate complex ideas and benefits through relatable situations and characters. These must be ‘human’ stories that show real-world outcomes, not just technical business values.
An excellent digital story will actively seek to trigger emotion, create a relatable context, and show how solutions have a positive impact. It allows companies to trace complex processes and products to actual, granular outcomes. This makes your message more memorable and easier to understand.
Digital storytelling technologies may include many of the hardware mentioned above, but they can be used on any screen. The best results are seen when these are combined: Customer-centric, immersive, and interactive. To offer this, a business must use professional digital storytelling software.
How digital storytelling software holds it all together?
Think of your digital storytelling software as an orchestra conductor: it can evoke powerful emotions and trigger the right instrument at the right moment.
In this case, your ‘instruments’ are the many digital storytelling tools in your portfolio: specific stories, music, backgrounds, interactive experiences, immersive experience rooms, digital signage – really anything and everything that can be used to tell a digital story.
As well as triggering the right story at the right moment, digital storytelling software is also used to create these stories. Individual digital assets can be compiled into distinct themes and stories, making your Briefing Center capable of total customization for specific customers or customer groups.
With Executive Briefing Centers becoming more complex and relying on multiple technologies, companies need software to make this jumble cohesive. Professional digital storytelling software can orchestrate these complex experiences perfectly and keep them adaptable for the future too.
