When you work in customer experience (CX), it’s easy to get stuck and feel unable to find a way to enhance the level of service you provide customers.
Adopting a design-led approach is a powerful way to elevate your customers’ experience of your service and can help you better drive the things that matter most to your business.
What is customer experience design (CXD)?
CXD is a bridge between strategy and delivery that can help you optimise customer experiences at all touchpoints before, during and after conversion.
It’s an approach to tackling your customer experience ambitions when you’ve realised that fixing the problems aren’t enough and it’s a losing battle.
By using CXD, you can also equip CX professionals with the skills to affect change and get the traction and support you need to make things happen.
Using CXD to deliver the strategy
Many organisations think it’s ‘job done’ once they’ve mapped out their customer journeys and have adopted a metric like NPS to report on the performance of their customer experience. Or that it’s ‘job done’ when they’ve identified that the customer is important to their strategy.
Although this is a critical first step, it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of measuring, reporting and sometimes fixing with very little tangible impact on customers or drivers for the business.
It can also be a struggle to convert a strategy into an experience in a meaningful and ambitious way that can be systematically delivered.
There soon comes a point where a business recognises that funding fixes doesn’t offer sufficient returns and it needs to make a bigger step change. That’s where CXD comes in and can help with the inertia around measuring, to bridge the translation gap between strategy and delivery.
Good design matters whether your company focuses on physical goods, digital products, services, or some combination of these. Yet, according to a McKinsey report, only half of companies surveyed conducted user research before generating their first design ideas or specifications.
Organisations who adopt CXD as part of their approach, perform better. McKinsey says that companies with top-quartile McKinsey Design Index (MDI) scores outperformed industry-benchmark growth by as much as two to one.
How CXD can transform your business
Using a CXD approach, we’ve addressed some of the age-old problems of CX professionals working across big organisations. Here are four examples:
-
Your view of your customer journey might suck
Customer journeys can often represent the internal processes of a company and not how people actually experience them.
CXD helps you to build a holistic picture of what your customers’ experience actually looks like and use that to define what it should be end-to-end. This helps you have the right conversations to reassess what you’re able to do and offer for your customers.
We worked with a leading 5-star airline that didn’t design for customers between the point of booking a ticket (which could have been up to six months in advance) and the day before the flight. The airline saw its customer journey solely through the lens of its processes, not what their customers actually experienced.
CXD will move you beyond mapping your customer journey to defining ways of making your experience more fit for purpose for your customers and your business.
-
Your business talks a great game, but customers don’t experience it
Having a corporate or brand strategy that doesn’t manifest itself into what your customers actually experience means there can often be a huge disconnect, or people in the organisation either don’t believe it or can’t act in the right way to deliver it.
A leading supermarket brand we worked with made big claims on how it would provide premium offers at affordable prices, but it remained limited to campaigns and won brand ranges, and no-one knew how it differentiated its experience beyond that, as such initiatives often contradicted that claim.
CXD helps you take a corporate or brand vision that defines what you want to stand for in your customers’ minds – or what you believe your real points of difference are – and interpret that into all aspects of what you deliver and how you deliver it, making it real.
-
You spend your time reacting, plugging holes and fighting fires
We can get fixated on problems and how we’ve tried to fix them, and we can make isolated decisions that seem right at the time but cause problems later for customers. It can be difficult to take a step back and recontextualise the problem so we can think differently and therefore be able to pre-emptively make our CX better.
One of our clients, a leading energy provider, focused solely on price competitiveness when it started losing customers quicker than it could win new ones. It was only by taking a step back and better understanding its customer journeys that the company realised it was trying to fix the wrong thing – the problem wasn’t cost but rather the complexity of pricing and the way the products were sold.
CXD helps you creatively solve known problems and uncover new ones that might be the root cause of the others. Not only that, it can help you systematically build an ambitious plan to circumvent the problems by marrying a deeper understanding of your customer now and in the future with the opportunities, constraints and capabilities of how you deliver.
-
You get stuck defining CX initiatives, rather than initiatives that impact your CX
CX initiatives can get stuck in isolated areas of the business and are seen as nice add-ons rather than fundamental parts of the way different initiatives are developed and implemented.
A leading premium car manufacturer we worked with, was about to launch a first-of-its-kind digital platform for booking a service and then tracking the work done on a customer’s vehicle.
During the development process the technical teams made the decision to get customers to use the ‘chassis number’ of their vehicle (often printed on the car body underneath the car) to log into the platform for the first time. Meaning this great initiative would have been almost impossible for customers to use if it wasn’t for CX professionals being in the room.
CXD helps you effectively collaborate with people across your organisation, as designing the experience will mean defining what’s required across products, services, people and operational delivery. This process can then influence and shape initiatives across the organisation and define any gaps that need filling, helping you prioritise and make sense of your development initiatives across your business.
Reimagine your CX
CXD isn’t a silver bullet, but it can help you create a foundation for helping your organisation become more customer-centred and fill the gaps between strategy and delivery.
Using a CXD approach can help you reimagine your CX and connect your customer strategy with meaningful and effective delivery of your experience.
