What Customer Experience Leaders Can Learn From Fan and Guest Experience
What does it take to create a guest experience that people do not just enjoy, but remember, talk about and want to come back to?
That was at the heart of our latest The Experience Gap Wednesday Webinar, where I was joined by Louise Lao, the Experience Design Lead working with the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Louise brings a pretty extraordinary background to the conversation. Before Brisbane 2032, she was Group General Manager of Customer Experience at Crown Resorts, the Hotel General Manager of three Hong Kong Disneyland hotels, and the Vice President of Customer Experience for Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts.
So when we started talking about the difference between customer experience, guest experience and fan experience, there was a lot to unpack.
And despite the enormous scale of an Olympic and Paralympic Games, many of the principles Louise shared are surprisingly relevant to every organisation trying to create a better customer experience.
Customer experience vs guest experience: what is the difference?
One of the first things Louise discussed was the distinction between traditional customer experience and guest experience.
In CX, we often think about the customer’s interaction with a product or service. Did they achieve the outcome they needed? Was the process easy? Did we solve their problem? Guest experience brings another layer to that.
The word guest changes the way you think about the relationship.
If someone is a guest, you are effectively welcoming them into your home.
The goal is not only to deliver the functional outcome. You want them to feel comfortable, welcomed, considered and looked after.
That shift in language is subtle, but it can completely change the mindset behind experience design.
Rather than simply asking:
“Did the experience work?”
you begin asking:
“How did we make this person feel while they were with us?”
And that is relevant whether you are designing an Olympic Games, a hotel stay, an event or a contact centre interaction.
Making Brisbane 2032 “worth it”
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was Louise’s perspective on what success looks like for Brisbane 2032. The Games are not simply something being delivered to Queensland. The goal is to bring Queenslanders on the journey.
Hosting an event of this scale inevitably brings disruption: Infrastructure changes, transport is affected, and communities all over the state experience construction, crowds, and changes to their normal routines.
For the guest experience to truly succeed, Louise spoke about the importance of making the Games feel worth it for the people who live here too. That means thinking beyond the spectators who buy a ticket.
The stakeholder group includes athletes, visitors, volunteers, local businesses, governments, residents and communities across Queensland. That’s a lot of people to consider when designing the experience!
Brisbane 2032 itself describes the Games as an opportunity to create long-term benefits for Queensland and Australia, rather than simply delivering a few weeks of competition. That is an important CX lesson in its own right:
Sometimes the people affected by an experience are much broader than the people directly purchasing or using it.
Great experience design starts by identifying all of them.
Brisbane 2032 isn’t only about Brisbane
That whole-of-community approach is already visible in the way Brisbane 2032 is building its identity.
The Olympic and Paralympic emblems are being revealed progressively across Queensland, with pieces unveiled in locations including Cairns, Townsville and Rockhampton before the final reveal in Brisbane. The approach is deliberately designed to make the identity of the Games feel broader than one host city.
The Brisbane emblem reveal takes place at Riverside Green, South Bank on Monday 5 October, with Brisbane 2032 describing the launch as a milestone in introducing the identity of the Games to the world.
That idea—bringing an entire state along rather than concentrating everything in Brisbane—also reflects the broader Games model. Brisbane 2032 has consistently positioned the event as one that reaches across multiple Queensland cities and regions, with regional participation forming part of the wider Games strategy.
For Louise, the challenge is therefore bigger than creating a fantastic experience inside a stadium.
It is about answering:
How do we welcome the world into our home and show them what Queensland is all about?
Disney’s lesson: cast (employee) experience comes before guest experience
Perhaps the most immediately applicable lesson Louise shared came from her time at Disney.
Disney is famous for its obsessive attention to detail. The magic is rarely created by one enormous interaction. It is the accumulation of hundreds of small details throughout the experience, they add up to make a big difference.
But there was another part of the Disney philosophy that stood out even more.
Before leaders could expect cast members to deliver the desired guest experience, the organisation had to deliver that experience to its own people first.
The executive team modelled the experience for cast members. Cast members then delivered it to guests.
In other words:
Team Member experience → guest experience.
That relationship is easy to talk about and much harder to operationalise.
But in hospitality, events, retail and service environments, your frontline team is the experience.
You can design the world’s best journey map, technology or operating model, but ultimately there will be moments where a customer encounters another human being.
That interaction can reinforce everything you intended—or undo it.
Your frontline needs to know what success looks like
While we’re not all running events at the scale of the Olympics or a Disneyland park, Louise’s advice here was refreshingly practical for everyone. Make sure your people know what success looks like.
Give them three or four tangible behaviours that clearly represent what great looks like. Train them properly. Explain the purpose behind what you are trying to create.
And then look after your team members so they can look after guests.
That will be particularly important for Brisbane 2032, where thousands of volunteers are expected to play a role in welcoming athletes and visitors. Brisbane 2032 has already identified volunteer management, athlete and guest services, transport and accommodation as significant elements of Games delivery.
You cannot expect a volunteer—or any frontline team member—to create an exceptional experience expecting them to intuitively understand what making a guest feels welcome looks like.
They need to understand:
- What experience are we trying to create?
- What does success actually look like?
- What do I personally need to do?
- Do I have the knowledge and confidence to do it?
That principle applies just as easily to a barista, hotel receptionist, contact centre agent or university student ambassador.
The commercial outcome still matters
Another theme captured in the attendee notes was something I talk about a lot at The Customer Connexion:
Great customer experience should lead to great commercial outcomes.
Being nice is not a business case for CX.
Better experiences can contribute to repeat visitation, loyalty, recommendation, stronger employee engagement and better brand perception.
At somewhere like Disney, that connection becomes particularly visible. The goal is not simply for someone to have one good interaction but for the entire experience to be designed as a continuation of moments that reinforce one another.
That relentless attention to detail is ultimately part of why customers become fans, obsessively in Disney’s case!
And that is perhaps one of the biggest differences between simply delivering satisfactory service and creating a memorable experience that people can’t wait to come back to.
What CX leaders can take from Brisbane 2032
Most of us will never design something on such a grand, global scale like the Olympic and Paralympic Games. But the principles Louise shared scale down remarkably well.
The next time you are looking at your own customer journey, consider:
Are we treating customers like transactions or guests?
Are we considering everyone affected by the experience, not just the person paying us?
Have we defined three or four behaviours that make “great” tangible for our frontline?
Are we giving our employees the experience and support we expect them to provide customers?
And are we paying enough attention to the small details?
Memorable experiences are built through dozens of small moments that consistently tell someone:
We’ve thought about you. You’re welcome here.
That is just as relevant in everyday customer experience as it is when Queensland welcomes the world in 2032.
