The customer experience of Church

FAST COMPANY has an insightful article in their latest issue about the future of customer experiences and how Apple has created nirvana for many customers and employees at their stores.

They have a section discussing the experiences in some of the world's largest service-industry companies such as Gap, Starbucks, The Container Store, and UPS. Alex Frankel worked at all of them in an undercover project and described his experiences with each in his new book "Punching In" which the article excerpts:

• Gap was "my gulag. I constantly waited for the end of my shift. Tortured with repetitive music and constant folding".

• Starbucks he describes as "a company with a company culture akin to kindergarten, where employees are taught to play well with others...".

• UPS offered "a highly regimented job but just enough independence for workers to feel energized."

Ouch...how would our volunteers at Four Corners or any volunteer-intensive church describe their experience though? Meaningful? Fun? Spiritual? How can we keep a keen and watchful eye for our volunteers' experience without losing our primary focus on new faces? Hmm...

The Apple mantra in their stores is to "reinvent retail". Training for each employee is carefully designed...ask questions of the customer to understand their needs, get permission to fire away and digging deeper to ascertain the best products. Apple's three P's: Position, Permission, Probe. Apple is trying to set a culture of employees less as sales people and more as distributors of needed information.

"When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond."

As churches move toward a more volunteer intensive environment, we cannot ignore the fact we are much like a customer experience at one of the above listed stores. We cannot deny religion has been commoditized for good or bad, and people look at many of their life experience opportunities as customers. They want information on our 'product' (i.e. where's the children's ministry? what does your church stand for? what kind of music do you sing? etc.) How we meet this challenge may decide the future for many of us...