Creating Next-Level Customer Experiences That Drive Innovation

Wesco and Eaton are Business Reporter clients.

Immersive environments can pave the way for deeper, more collaborative customer relationships that lead to stronger outcomes.

There’s tremendous power in trust, especially in business. When customers trust that you have their best interests in mind, they’re more likely to have open, honest conversations about their goals and challenges.

But how do you create that kind of relationship with your customers? How do you create an environment where they trust you to not only solve their problems, but also address challenges they didn’t even know they had?

The key is creating a powerful, tailored and immersive experience that showcases your expertise and provides free-flowing collaboration. Anyone can simply sell a product. But truly becoming part of the customer journey and helping clients achieve their goals sets the foundation for successful, long-term partnerships.

At Wesco and Eaton, we’ve channeled that passion for becoming a valued, trusted partner into innovation and experience centers specifically designed to solve our customers’ challenges. These offer more than simple tours or presentations, and are specifically designed to provide value and benefits beyond the challenge the customer is looking to overcome.

Seeing solutions in action

To begin with, these centers let customers go beyond the catalogue or specification sheet and see the solutions in person—and often in action. At Eaton’s Experience Centers, customers learn about industry best practices and the latest innovations through hands-on demos and training in multiple application environments. For example, customers can see how employees can be better safeguarded with electrical system testing products that prevent recordable injury incidents.

The Wesco Innovation Center also lets customers take advantage of a breadth of deep solutions, thanks to a robust partner ecosystem with manufacturers such as Eaton. Whether you are trying to leverage technology to better secure a facility or improve your production line efficiency, a range of solutions can be explored. And, if a deeper dive into a specific solution is needed, Wesco and its manufacturer partners can provide that through various options, including via Wesco’s Infrastructure Solutions Lab, a 4,000-square-foot facility dedicated to researching, testing and evaluating solutions to help customers meet their application challenges.

Customers can also see how seemingly disparate solutions—such as lighting, IoT and network infrastructure—can come together to enhance operations. At the end of the day, it’s all about giving customers confidence that their unique needs and challenges will be met.

Harnessing the power of design thinking

Every visit to these centers is tailored to address the customers’ particular challenges, but the real value comes from facilitating an honest and collaborative conversation and identifying key challenges, then determining what goals and outcomes the customers and their various stakeholders are looking to achieve. Taking the time to understand each perspective allows for the creation of an end-to-end solution that best addresses everyone’s needs.

This type of approach often enables the customer to address challenges they didn’t even know they had, or to find better solutions based on their goals. For example, a hospital might want to upgrade their lighting to be more energy-efficient, or to implement electric charging solutions to help employees and patients. This may require the hospital to update its electrical infrastructure or investigate whether a microgrid could provide a more reliable, resilient and sustainable energy solution.

Identifying potential solutions is just the first step in addressing a challenge. Innovation and experience centers allow customers to leverage our subject matter experts (SMEs) and implement technology and deployment plans to execute projects on time and under budget.

An ISP expands its service offering

A large internet service provider (ISP) wanted to build out its suite of product offerings to its customers to stay competitive in a tight market.

Visiting the innovation center allowed the client to identify a new IoT solution that could create a new revenue stream and provide more value to its customers. Had the ISP’s representatives not visited, they might not have known that Wesco could help with applications engineering, sourcing solutions in various regions and training, leveraging its global logistics network to help them scale deployments across the globe.

Joining customers on their journey

Many businesses, regardless of industry, are facing challenges on several fronts, from labor shortages to supply chain issues and cost pressures. At the same time, they’re often tasked with meeting environmental or energy-related goals. Innovation and ingenuity are key to addressing these challenges, whether by using advanced technology and connected solutions or by finding a more efficient way to source materials. This means off-the-shelf fixes often won’t cut it.

Businesses need to be confident that their partners genuinely understand their unique needs and are prepared to help them achieve their goals. Innovation and experience centers, such as those of Wesco and Eaton, are an excellent way to foster a relationship of trust and help customers on their journey to success. When done correctly, they can provide several powerful benefits to the customer and make a meaningful impact on their goals and objectives.

To learn more about Eaton’s Experience Centers, visit eaton.com/experience, and for Wesco’s solutions, visit wesco.com.

About the authors:

Scott Dowell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, US Industrial, Wesco

Dan is the Director of the Eaton Experience Centers in Pittsburgh and Houston, where tens of thousands of industry professionals have come to learn about Eaton’s electrical solutions for power quality, efficiency and safety. In previous roles at Eaton, Dan led a group of engineers performing power quality analysis that has conducted hundreds of power quality site investigations for commercial, industrial and utility power systems. Dan has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, a master’s degree in power systems and an MBA. He is a registered professional engineer in the states of Pennsylvania, California and Alaska, a certified energy manager (CEM) and a senior member of IEEE.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.