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What a Summer Backyard Project Taught Me About Customer Experience
This summer, I became a mermaid. Well, sort of.
It started with a neglected little corner of my backyard that I decided needed to become something else. I didn't want another landscaped bed or a place where I could point to some flowers and say, “Look what I planted.” I wanted it to feel like someplace someplace else like a cozy, unexpected little escape where you could sit down and, for a while, forget you were in a suburban backyard. So I created the Mermaid Cove.
Apparently, when I get an idea like this, moderation is not my strong suit. By the time I was finished, I had hauled 70 bags of pea gravel, 110 bags of mulch and 10 bags of topsoil, planted about 30 new perennials, dug and edged and rearranged and redesigned, and then dug some more. There was no landscaper involved. Just me, a shovel and a vision that became considerably more ambitious somewhere around I'll just take out some rosebushes.
But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't really landscaping.
I was creating an experience. I thought about how the space would feel when someone entered it. Where people would sit. What they would see. How the plants, furniture, lighting and little unexpected details would work together. I wanted it to feel comfortable and a little whimsical, like you'd stumbled onto someplace you weren't expecting to find.
And once you create a Mermaid Cove, obviously you have to have a mermaid party. So I invited a few friends over. I made mermaid crowns, ate, drank, laughed and spent the evening enjoying this slightly mystical little world I'd spent the summer creating. And why not? Why can't grown women be mermaids?
When I watched the video from that evening it occurred to me that I've actually been doing some version of this throughout my career, luckily without lugging pea gravel.
I've designed branded events and customer-appreciation experiences meant to make people feel something, not simply put a logo in front of them. I've developed advertising and marketing campaigns based on what customers and patients actually needed to experience based on listening, rather than what an organization hoped they were experiencing. I've worked with call centers, operations, marketing and other cross-functional teams because customers experience an organization in total despite departments perpetually working in silos.
I've also worked on internal branding and employee initiatives because the experience you promise externally has to connect with what happens internally. And for the past decade, my work has involved sitting across from customers, patients, employees and others listening to them talk about what works, what doesn't, what matters to them and what organizations aren't paying attention to.
Different projects. Different industries. Different settings. But there is a common thread running through all of it: How do you want people to feel when they're here, whether it's your store, office, online, with customer service and within your brand as a whole?
Long before the world became too comfortable interacting through screens, I was creating reasons for people to come together in person. Events. Branded customer experiences. Employee experiences. Conversations. Environments designed not simply to deliver information, but to create connection.
Technology has given us extraordinary ways to communicate, work and reach people. But convenience and connection aren't the same thing. There are things that happen when people occupy the same space that are difficult to manufacture through a screen. Someone leans over and starts a conversation. A laugh travels across the room. You notice someone's reaction. People linger. An unexpected idea comes up. You meet someone you weren't supposed to meet. You remember the music, the food, the room or perhaps the ridiculous tower you built with those colorful bricks you used as a kid in a workshop with people you had never met before.
In-person experiences give us something technology can't fully replicate: shared memory and I think businesses need to remember that.
As organizations race toward more automation, AI, digital self-service and efficiency, the human experience becomes more, not less important. Not every interaction needs to happen in person. But the ones that do should be worth showing up for. And that applies to customer events and conferences, but it also applies to employee gatherings, workshops, research, healthcare experiences, hospitality and the physical spaces where customers encounter a brand. Bringing people together isn't enough. We have to think about what happens once they get there.
We tend to talk about customer experience in terms of journeys, touchpoints, metrics, surveys and dashboards. Those things matter, but none of them is the experience.
The experience happens in the moments.
Great experiences rarely happen accidentally. That's probably why I can look at an empty corner of a yard and not just see dirt and plants. I start imagining what could happen there. Who might sit there. How it could feel. What would make it memorable.
I do the same thing when I look at a customer experience, an event, a business problem or a room full of people who need to figure something out together. I want to understand what's happening now, listen to the people who are actually experiencing it and then ask: What could this become?
Sometimes the answer begins with research. Sometimes it begins with a conversation. Sometimes it begins with an idea scribbled on a piece of paper. And sometimes, apparently, it begins with 70 bags of pea gravel. Would I haul all 70 again? Ask me after my back forgets. But would I create the Mermaid Cove again? Absolutely!
Because my friends probably won't remember exactly which flowers I planted or how many bags of mulch I hauled. But they'll remember sitting together on a summer evening, wearing homemade crowns, laughing and embracing the fact that a bunch of grown women had decided, for one night, to be mermaids.
And isn't that what a great experience is supposed to do? Give us something worth remembering.
Laura M. Nozicka is a strategist, qualitative researcher, facilitator and speaker with 30+ years spent helping organizations across healthcare, wellness, hospitality and lifestyle categories really understand what's really going on with their customers and stakeholders, and crafting the story behind the dashboard. She is the founder of Big Idea Tango and creator of the Co-Build Method™, a hands-on informed approach to co-creating with teams and customers instead of around them. Her newsletter Voice of the Room illuminates the conversations that make the story behind the dashboard real.
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