Scaling Customer Experience with Design

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

- Steve Jobs

When it comes to successful brands with an identity that sticks and remains positive, it’s vital to remember that the brand is created, managed, provided, offered, or sold — it is all for the customers. That doesn’t mean that your quality is compromised; it only means that the quality and experience be centered on what the customer truly wants. And as a higher number of brands today are shifting their approach towards a more customer-focused one, this new concept is slowly rising, often being overheard in strategies- to-scale meetings.

Here comes CX.

DID YOU MEAN UX?

No, we didn’t. It is often misconstrued as the same, CX and UX and actually two very various aspects, although one is a subset of the other.

UX, or User Experience, refers to building and designing the best possible experience for users on a digital platform.

CX, on the other hand, is a larger picture. Customer Experience focuses on enhancing the experience of the customer and to-be customers across all the channels of interaction they have with the brand. Whether it is the first time they’re coming across the brand or the nth time they’re using its products/services and reaching out to customer care — CX covers the entire journey.

SO WHAT DOES CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DESIGN BRING TO THE TABLE?

As we read earlier, unlike UX or User Experience, CX focuses on not just how the users interact with a digital product or service but how a potential customer, as well as existing ones, would interact across different touch-points with the brand. And just as important as design is for UX, so it is for CX.

Visualize the complexity that arises with a brand that has its team and processes scattered. A brand selling coffee, for example, may have its inventories online as well as offline, with different vendors and channel partners. For a customer, however, it’s their singular experience with the brand that matters. If they do not find the coffee online, they will reach out to an offline vendor, and if their experience with that vendor does not go well, it’s the brand that would eventually face the brunt. CX is what brings it all together.

And how does design factor into all of this?

Notice how IT teams and organizations are realizing the importance of eliminating complex and inconsistent processes, letting go of rigidity, and thereby accelerating their speed? This has led many to shift to the cloud, seeking a more seamless and agile infrastructure.

Just like the cloud in IT infrastructure, design operations in CX bring a similar management discipline, focusing on all possible touch-points a customer interacts with a brand. Running them as one seamless, single entity doesn’t just solve a lot of issues but also gives the customers a better brand experience.

- It increases consistency, efficiency, and agility from the side of the brand and reduces unnecessary hassles and possible negative experiences a customer or even future customer may have with the brand.

- The coordination when multiple agencies come into the picture is cut down, saving on a lot of time and mind-space.

- The review processes become easier since everything is integrated together.

- Costs are cut down as the number of varied processes come down and merge into one single entity.

- Remember ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’? With a well-designed CX, the number of ‘cooks’ comes down, and the final authority rests on a lesser number of expert shoulders.

- The usage of common tools also significantly decreases infrastructure and cost requirements, and confusion is arising due to multiple unique tools being employed.

- Scaling would therefore become easier, with a better scope of improvement, experimentation, and strong core support.

Implementing design operations with like-minded designers and IT professionals in place of outdated processes will provide a substantial competitive advantage — not just for the internal processes, but one that reflects among the viewers and customers. They would no longer find a disconnect in different sectors when they interact with the brand. Their experience would straighten out in a seamless, more consistent, logical, and easy pattern, thereby increasing their trust in the brand.

HOW DO WE SHIFT FOCUS AND INITIATE BETTER CX?

With CX, it is not just about understanding the customer profile, their psyche, and working out the issues that come up, but also about forming ideas on what may be the potential customer psyche, anticipating issues that would likely crop up for existing ones, and then finding solutions to make that journey easier.

The initial step is to chart out a customer journey that involves ALL the touch-points through which the customer interacts with the brand. Step two would be designing effective processes and communication through all of them. Eventually, all of these would have to be aligned together.

Some factors need to be consistently kept in mind, though:

- It’s essential to make customers feel valued throughout. A brand shouldn’t just be speaking about what it’s offering, but also about how what it’s offering would make the customer’s life easier.

- Anticipating the mindset of the customers and their needs at every point, we also need to make sure that we’re not imposing ourselves on them, yet being there whenever required and making things easier for the customer.

- Each point of the customer journey carries equal importance. Impressions and experiences go a long way. So from the moment they didn’t receive a response to their initial query to the moment they suddenly had a bad experience after years of loyalty, each moment can turn into a bad review and a break of trust in the brand, triggering another chain reaction for the brand reputation.

Building the right operations, in the beginning, would require investment and an acceptance of the change. Processes will move from individual mandates into an aligned structure.

It would not be easy, but nothing that’s worth it is actually ever easy.

With a strong commitment, we can begin to peel back the many layers and simplify, giving the best of what we can, in the best possible way — all designed and strategized around the customer’s delight. After all, there’s no better testimony than happy and satisfied customers!