Want Customers to Remember Their Great Experience With You? Plus Up the Experience

Walt Disney is remembered for a great many things. Animated feature films, as well as live action movies. He completely rethought the amusement park industry, and his thought processes are still at the foundation of the culture in the company he created. Walt was someone who always wanted to show improvement, make things better for those that would experience it. He found that limiting sometimes with his movies. He noted that once a movie was done, it was done. While he could make it outstanding in the creation process (and he did, establishing an attention to detail that is still embedded today) once the movie was made, there weren’t options to improve it afterwards. (Forget that movies get remade in different times, that was not what he was thinking about then, for sure.) He had always wanted something he could continue to build and grow. Enter Disneyland and, more than that, the idea of creating experiences for others.

Walt wanted to have a better ‘park’ experience for parents to share with their children. He wanted a place that everyone could enjoy, not just one group or the other. He felt it should be clean and easy to navigate. The idea of Disneyland was born. But it has become so much more than that. Shortly after the park opened, Disney was speaking about having something that he could continue to build and improve. He spoke to the idea of ‘plussing,’ a term people at Disney still use today.

"The park means a lot to me, in that it's something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to—it's alive. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need changes. — Walt Disney

It also began the foundation of being more than an expansion plan, or adding lands and attractions to the park. It was about continual progress in everything that was done at the Disney Company.

“To Walt, ‘plus’ was a verb—an action word—signifying the delivery of more than what his customers paid for or expected to receive. He constantly challenged his Imagineers to see what was possible, and then take it a step further … and then a step beyond that.”

Plus up the experience

Walt knew, even then, that ‘plussing’ wasn’t just for improving the park, it was about improving the experience.

From Walt Disney’s Magical Strategy for Being Excellent in Everything.

Shortly after Walt Disney opened his theme park, he decided to hold a Christmas parade. When he totaled up the expense, he realized his idea and vision would cost the park roughly $350,000.

His accountants begged him not to spend the money because the people would already be there; nobody would complain if it didn’t happen because no one was expecting it.

Disney’s response was,

“We should do it precisely because no one’s expecting it. Our goal at Disneyland is to always give people more than they expect. As long as we keep surprising them, they’ll keep coming back. But if they ever stop coming, it’ll cost us ten times that much to get them to come back”.

In a short exchange, Disney defined loyalty and a growth trajectory that any business can, and should, follow. He established that it is less about the money and more about what you provide to your guests.

Mindset over expense

Adding to an experience a customer has is usually less about how much it costs, and more about the reason you are delivering it. Plussing up will not come from someone spending money, it will come from someone making a personalized decision to make something better for another person. In a previous article on service, I spoke to how Ritz-Carlton empowers their employees to spend over $2,000 to make a situation right for a customer. I also noted that the threshold is rarely tested to its upper limits. Instead, employees create a better experience that is specific to the situation and the customer. The customer likely never thinks about what that cost Ritz-Carlton; rather, they recognize what it feels like and means to them. This approach is about having a service-oriented mindset that is continually looking for a way to improve the experience. That is a mindset of plussing the customer experience, and often, it costs very little to accomplish.

It is easy to point to the success that has become the Walt Disney Company we know today. Going to any Disney park is a magical experience. I have been going for years, am a huge Disney fanboy, and I still walk away in wonder and awe after visiting the parks. Knowing what it takes to ensure so many employees will deliver the type of experience that Walt imagined so many years ago is still an unbelievable feat to me. The idea of ‘plussing up the experience’ will never be something you can ‘teach’ to your team. It has to become something they do, within a culture that supports and expects it. It’s an attitude that we continually look for ways to make it better for you, even in the smallest of details. And, honestly, even in ways you (dear customer) might not notice. We do, and that matters.

How can you begin to ‘plus up’ the experience for your customers?

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Photo by Jayme McColgan on Unsplash