Beyond the Product: Jason Feifer on Elevating Customer Experience Through Unexpected Touches

In a recent LinkedIn post, Jason Feifer explores how businesses can achieve greater differentiation by focusing on the customer experience, particularly through innovative and unexpected touches. Feifer, an entrepreneur and editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, uses examples from his own travels to illustrate how seemingly small details can transform a familiar offering into a memorable and personalized interaction.

Feifer highlights a hotel that offered a “pillow menu” as a prime example of this strategy. He notes:

“This is Casa Mâe in Portugal, where I just stayed. They didn’t invent the pillow menu, but I loved seeing it there. Here’s why: It takes something familiar and overlooked, and turns it into a joyful and customized experience.”

This observation, according to Feifer, points to a broader business principle: standing out requires more than just a good product or service. True differentiation, he argues, often lies in innovating the customer’s journey in ways that others haven’t considered.

The Power of the Overlooked

Feifer elaborates on this concept by drawing a parallel to an Uber driver he encountered in Alaska. This driver had implemented a “conversation menu” in his vehicle, offering passengers a choice of interaction styles, from being a confidant to simply providing silence. This, Feifer suggests, is another instance of elevating the customer experience by acknowledging and catering to individual preferences.

“To stand out in business, you need more than just a good product or service. Differentiation lives in your customer’s *experience*… and that often starts with the thing nobody else thought to innovate,” Feifer writes.

This perspective challenges businesses to look beyond their core offerings and examine the periphery of their operations. Feifer encourages readers to identify aspects of their business that are often taken for granted or overlooked, and to consider how these elements could be reimagined to create a unique and positive customer interaction.

Innovating the Customer Journey

The core of Feifer’s message is that innovation in customer experience doesn’t always require groundbreaking technology or a complete overhaul of services. Instead, it can be found in the thoughtful enhancement of existing touchpoints. By focusing on these “overlooked parts of your business,” companies can create moments of delight and surprise that resonate deeply with their customers.

Feifer prompts business leaders to ask themselves:

“Look around at the overlooked parts of your business. How can you transform them into the unexpected?”

He concludes that these unexpected, personalized touches are what customers are most likely to remember, fostering loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. In Feifer’s view, this focus on experiential differentiation is key to thriving in a competitive market.

The insights shared by Feifer on LinkedIn offer a valuable framework for businesses seeking to enhance their brand perception and customer engagement by looking for opportunities to innovate in the often-unseen details of the customer journey.