Lisa Renneisen: How to provide exceptional experiences that engage and delight customers

So much so that her and her co-founder Nadine Zrinzo changed the name of their business from Bright Conferences to Bright Humans – better reflecting the fact that their company had evolved to provide not just event management services, but exceptional customer experiences and human-led design for their conferences.

“I guess, as time went on for us, the events were always the vehicle but they weren’t what drove us,” Lisa says.

“So we were really driven by creating these outstanding experiences and delivering this learning and this content to people. And we just felt events were this beautiful way to do it. So that’s what really excited us.” 

“And I guess that’s kind of what transitioned us into them becoming Bright Humans, because we didn’t just want to be about running events for the sake of running events. We wanted to create these outstanding experiences that might impact the ecosystem and then help to drive the community forward.”

But how did their customers – even their friends and family – take the change that repositioned them from an events company to something with far more depth but potentially also more nuance?

“It was the simplest change we ever could have done,” Lisa says.

“We told a few people and they’re like, ‘Yeah. That’s way better. That’s cool.’ And then we told some other people and it was just so phenomenally accepted, and we were quick to drop Bright Conferences and just be Bright Humans. 

“It’s really interesting because when we were Bright Conferences, people would often refer to us as just Bright. And now people actually say Bright Humans more because I think we left behind something that didn’t match up, and took on something that matched our brand position of creating experiences, not just conferences, to perfection.”

The semantics are pretty simple, but Lisa warns it can quickly veer into buzzword territory if not focused correctly. She says human-centred design is about putting your audience or customers – their thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, wants, aspirations, fears, the lot – at the centre of the experiences you provide. And it’s no longer negotiable – it’s a must.

“For us, no matter what we’re doing, it’s seeing that people are at the core of what you do,” she says. 

“I think there was a period for a while where we saw the learning at the events as being the key thing that happened in there. And then you kind of dig into things a bit further and you start to realise that people are really there for the other people.

“It’s that conscious design of an experience and knowing it’s not just enough to put out some chairs, get some speakers and hope that everything comes together. Everything is intentionally designed and that’s what we try to create for people.”