A few years ago, as Wainwright Bank was preparing to open a new branch in the Davis Square neighborhood of Somerville, Mass., a passerby peeked inside the door and expressed her approval to Steve Young, the bank’s senior vice president. “She said, ‘Oh, this is just what Davis Square has always needed — a day care center,” Young recalls. “I said, ‘No, this is a bank,’ and her jaw dropped.”

The woman’s confusion was understandable. While many banks rely on drab color schemes to create an atmosphere of trustworthiness, Wainwright opts for unconventional designs and amenities not typically associated with a financial institution. In fact, the Davis Square location doubles, in look and function, as a cyber café, where customers can sip coffee, munch on doughnuts, surf the Web, and read newspapers and magazines — at no cost.

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Young says Wainwright’s 11 Boston-area locations not only are designed to improve the customer experience, they’re also reflective of the neighborhoods they serve and the bank’s socially progressive brand. Two of Wainwright’s newly opened branches, for example, have been LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council for their energy-saving features. “I’ve always felt that good design was important to make people want to bank with us,” Young points out. “It’s part of the equation, along with the rates and the convenience.”

Wainwright is hardly alone in paying close attention to the in-store experience. From a small bank in Oklahoma that offers its customers a park to relax in, complete with walking trails and a gazebo, to retail outlets that deliver highly customized music and video presentations, companies across all industries are realizing that design, entertainment features, and amenities can differentiate them from competitors, help stimulate growth, and lead to higher customer satisfaction research scores.

“Businesses need to come up with something dynamic on the entertainment front to get customers to stay in the store longer and, hopefully, get them to spend more,” says Jon Young, vice president of North American sales at YCD Multimedia, which works with multinational clients to upgrade their in-store environment.

Ahead of the Pack
Creating unique in-store experiences for customers is particularly important in retail, says Bill Chidley, a vice president of strategy and research at Design Forum, a Dayton, Ohio–based design and branding consultancy. “A lot of the differentiation [in retail over the years] has been based on price and selection,” he says. “As we get to where there is parity in price and selection, what is the extra ingredient that makes you want to, say, drive past CVS to Walgreens, or vice versa?”

Often, it’s what customers experience when they walk through the front door, Chidley notes. Consider the recent improvements made by Boulder, Colo.–based organic and natural foods grocer Wild Oats, which was recently acquired by Whole Foods. One of Wild Oats’ chief draws is its wide selection of vitamins and supplements, but customers were finding it difficult to comparison shop because products were sorted by brand rather than by type.

To improve the ease of navigation, Wild Oats turned to Design Forum. “We needed to make the aisles wider, so people didn’t feel pressured to hurry,” Chidley says. Design Forum added more signage and a variety of communications about how to serve more appetizing, healthful food. It also convinced Wild Oats to stock its vitamins and supplements by type. The improvements have made a big difference: remodeled stores are seeing increases in average weekly sales, customer traffic, and basket size, leading to revenues 20 percent to 50 percent higher than in the older stores.

Exceeding Expectations
According to Chidley, if the in-store environment doesn’t live up to the promises a company makes in its advertising, it can have a detrimental effect on customers. Such was the case with Washington Mutual, a large financial services company based in Seattle. “In their ads they said they were different,” Chidley says. “Then you would go to a branch and it looked like any other bank. There was nothing dramatic to substantiate the claim that they were different.”

Working closely with Design Forum, Washington Mutual addressed the problem by completely redesigning its branches. It started with the angst generated by teller lines. Washington Mutual got rid of them altogether and replaced them with what they call “teller towers,” which are essentially information booths out on the branch floor. Now, when a customer enters a branch, he or she is greeted by a de facto concierge who tells them how much time it will take before they’re served.

By eliminating the lines and putting tellers out on the branch floor, Washington Mutual created a more relaxed, personally engaging environment. In turn, customers are more amenable to learning about other bank products from the tellers or through the interactive displays. “It’s a liberating environment to the customer, as well as to the employees,” says Chidley, adding that the branches have seen substantial increases in deposits and loan volume.

At the core of all these efforts is a desire to tighten the bond with customers. “We want to delight them,” Wainwright’s Young says.

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