Designing the Customer Journey
Dell Storage Forum, Boston, MA - 2012
The Challenge
Dell Storage Forum (700+ attendees) needed to prove that two recent acquisitions – EqualLogic and AppAssure – were now one coherent enterprise storage story, credible enough to compete with category leader EMC. My job was to make the physical space itself carry that argument, before a single salesperson opened their mouth.
The Approach
A layout built to solve problems. The expo hall was a half-sun: Dell's own booth was in front with kiosks arranged in staggered concentric arcs at the center – five up front, six behind – radiating out into vendor "rays" of one to three booths each, clustered by which Dell product they complemented. EqualLogic anchored the center. Front-arc booths were two-sided: live hardware facing the aisle, live demos behind. The result – a customer standing anywhere in the hall was standing inside one complete solution story, not a scatter of logos. I also used the natural traffic pattern deliberately: cocktail tables and bars sat in the wider gaps and corners, pulling attendees out toward the vendor booths farthest from center.
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Hear from the customers first, Dell second. We placed 6 customer story booths outside of the main floor, in the pre-function area – each aligned to one of the six solution groupings inside. Attendees heard from real customers before they ever entered Dell's space, where they were guided to the right solution band by subject matter experts.
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A hallway that talks. The connecting corridor to the hotel was unusually wide – dead space by default. Standing wayfinding signs filled it with two narratives depending on direction of travel: one preparing attendees for the skybridge ahead, another offering takeaways on the way back.
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The connecting bridge. Two-sided window clings ran the length of the skybridge, translating Dell's Fluid Data Architecture into a two-minute walk. One side laid out the architecture in plain steps; the other carried supporting marketing messaging. Sales teams began using the bridge itself as a place to have the conversation, not just walk through it.
The result was an unprecedented 100% satisfaction rating from customers, colleagues, and partners for the expo hall design, and a floor that moved more people, more efficiently, toward the solutions they'd actually come to find.
