Regardless of your industry, the digital landscape has shifted the way your customers make decisions:

1. “Convince me you’re worth it.” They gravitate to authentic stories over marketing copy, in the form of reviews, testimonials, and user content.
2. “Know me better, help me faster.” They ask questions and expect on-demand, personalized solutions tailored to their unique situation.
3. “Wow me.” They evaluate the caliber of your organization’s entire online presence as a proxy for your people, products and services.

These map to three dimensions that customers measure you on: authenticity, personalization, and caliber. To earn their attention and commitment, you need to deliver on these at a high level. This can be a daunting task. How do you learn their needs and interests, and shift to a customer-centric marketing strategy? Organizations who have solved this are winning in the market.

The great storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage. Bill Gurley

Over the last few years, we’ve served brick and mortar organizations through interactive projects and virtual tours that enhance their online presence. It’s something we’re extremely passionate about. When we took stock of the trends above and the problems with existing virtual tour solutions, it inspired us to map out a path to designing best-in-class interactive tours. This meant understanding and fixing major user pain points, and re-imagining how virtual tours are experienced. The end goal was not to develop a better product. It was to create a platform for telling stories more effectively, catering content more personally, and making the journey as experiential and dynamic as possible.

Introducing Circuit Virtual Tours

We’re excited to announce Circuit, a tool for creating incredible interactive tours that drive real results. Delivering engaging tour experiences helps organizations generate high quality conversions, gain valuable insights and build stronger relationships with prospective customers.

What can you accomplish with Circuit?

Exploring the intricacies of venues like campuses, retirement homes, or concert halls is typically achieved through in-person tours. Mimicking this, Circuit presents the best parts of your venue as a cohesive digital experience. It’s a personalized story instead of a simple list of places, offering unique journeys for different customer personas and channels. This helps educate prospects and increases willingness to visit. For those who are further along in the funnel and have already visited your space, it’s a logical follow-up to an in person tour to show them things that weren’t happening or accessible on tour day.

Who is it designed for?

Circuit was built for any brick and mortar location that wants to use their space to engage prospective customers online. Initial use cases are schools, fitness and community centres, theatres and concert halls, museums and galleries, hotels and lodging, real estate, architecture, and travel and tourism.

How does it work?

Guide and onboarding

The most impactful in-person tours we attended during our research had an experienced guide leading us through the space while showing the places that matched with our interests. Circuit starts by introducing a guide, and getting users to describe what they’re looking for. This info is used to pick relevant content and craft a bespoke tour experience. It also allows organizations to capture opt-ins from users and deliver targeted follow-ups.

Curated, personalized stories

74% of users get frustrated with websites when content has nothing to do with their interests (Janrain, 2013). To avoid this, users are presented with scenes curated for them based on their inputs, just like a receptive tour guide would do.

Media focused design for impactful visuals

The main screen uses a clean, simple interface where the guide provides narration, and media is front and centre. Pairing visuals with copy is proven to improve information retention by 65% (LifeLearn, 2015) and increase social shares by 40X (Buffer, 2014).

The interface elements work to make 360° more accessible than ever. During research we found many users were unaware they could pan and view 360 degrees around them, were unsure where focal points were and had trouble navigating content smoothly. For those users, imagery automatically pans to hotspots to direct their focus around the screen as the guide narrates the story.

Call to actions make next steps easy

Call to action buttons throughout the experience allow users to connect with organizations with pertinent questions, set up in-person visits, or find supplementary information on the website.

Drive more conversions and tell your story

Circuit wasn’t designed to replace in-person tours. It works in tandem to engage your audience with personalized content, and encourages them to visit. It’s a storytelling tool to generate greater interest and understanding in the minds of your customers, who are more independent in their decision journey. When you impress your customers with interactive experiences, you inform and enable them to make better decisions.

Thanks to everyone who gave input during the customer discovery process. We’re really excited about the journey ahead.