Defining an Impactful Customer Experience Design Strategy

A differentiated, improved and innovative customer experience drives business growth, increases customer loyalty and is key to success.

Customers choose services based on their experience using them. Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience. Businesses that treat their customers as king; the most priced asset in the enterprise, have reported higher returns than their counterparts.

However, business leaders, digital product owners and directors find it challenging to design projects that increase customer satisfaction and deliver results. Often product teams focus on fixing elements of the interaction experience which is less important to customers than the product experience.

Recent statistics show that a total of $62 billion is lost by US businesses each year following bad customer experiences. 74% are likely to switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult.

So if you ever find any of your team thinking or saying “That’s not how we do it” then chances are you’re not always putting the customer first.

Delivering an effortless, personalized interaction experience creates a good impression, but is not a game changer.

The experiences that enable customers self-affirmation, make them feel confident about their decision and the value they derive from it, can help build lasting customer loyalty.

Building customer loyalty is the key to meeting an organization's business goals and improving financial outcomes. Yet, there is a big gap between CX strategy and reality (ie what customers really want).

Building a strategy that will have a meaningful impact on customer loyalty and, ultimately, business growth, requires organizations to create experiences that are salient or outstanding for customers.

As a first step, organizations need to understand why customers come to regard certain experiences as more memorable and important than others and

to dig deeper into the factors that determine customer loyalty.

Differentiated Experiences are key to a high impact CX Design Strategy

Using factor analysis, it has been observed that there are four primary categories of customers’ salient experiences that includes interaction experience, product experience, brand perception and price. Taken together, these four categories represent the customer’s evaluation of the companies they do business with and the products they purchase.

Interaction experience

Interaction experience includes factors like quality, convenience, personalization, uniqueness and “in experience” learning.

The experience can be gauged from the following questions:

Was it easy to interact with the company?
Were you able to interact with the company the way you wanted?
Did the company make you feel that they knew you?
Was your experience the same as with other companies or was it exceptional?
Did the experience teach you something that you didn't already know?

Product experience

Product experience encompasses what the product does, and how customers feel about it. Reflects how customers perceive the company in light of their experience using the company’s product/service.

This includes factors such as product utility, usability, customer needs alignment and life enrichment.

The experience can be gauged from the following questions.

Does the product work for me?

Is the product easy to use?

Does the product address my changing needs?

Does using the product make my life better?

Brand perception

Brand perception reflects customers’ view of the company’s industry position and sense of alignment with the company’s values.

Price

Price reveals estimation of whether the product offers good value for money. Interaction experience and product experience are the two major areas that have a major impact on customer loyalty.

“Product experience has the greatest impact on customer loyalty, accounting for over 36% of the change in the attitudinal loyalty index, compared with 30.4% for interaction experience, 20.4% for brand perception and 13% for price.”
Gartner

Product Experience Improvements create a Differentiated CX

Customer centered improvements to product experience evoke positive impressions and make customers feel they have made the right choice. Progressive organizations favoring digital transformation are beginning to innovate by adding new touchpoints to the customer experience that allow their customers to self-affirm the value they derive from the purchased product or service.

These CX innovations are easier to develop and less time consuming.

Read our e-book MVP in a Week to see how to test and de-risk ideas and find a clear direction in under 1 week.

Organizations that are experience-centric or those that are experience focused have a key success factor of paying attention to detail and to align around the customer experience.

A good example is Apple, the first trillion dollar company that has consistently laid emphasis on experience-centric strategy for the past 20 years by having a clear clear vision starting with the experience and working backward throughout the organization for achieving it.

Another example is Amazon who have right from the initial stages been totally fixated on the customer experience.

The most successful innovations in online shopping have come from them and most recently their innovative concept of walk-in walk-out brick and mortar stores serves as a model on how to continually improve the experience for the customers.

Building a high lifetime value among its customer base through proactive delight has been a powerful differentiator, and it has paid off for them. The average lifetime value of their Prime customer was estimated at $2,500 in 2017.

What are the implications?

Organizations require tools and processes to identify and prioritize opportunities. These are some of the ways that can be reinforced to achieve business goals and build lasting customer loyalty:

Strategy 1

Build a CX design strategy rooted in differentiation

Understanding users is a key differentiator. Traditional methods of prioritizing customer issues can often prove ineffective to guide the product team towards the most impactful customer experiences. Part of the challenge is that emotional impressions/moments are difficult to interpret using standard surveys and data.

Those who stick to traditional methods will be forced to play catch up in the coming years.

Solutions

The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Those with an eye towards the future are boosting their data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify CX issues and opportunities in real time.

Think personalised compensation for a flight delay, or outreach from an insurance company when a patient is having trouble getting pre-authorization for hospitalization

Changing how product teams listen to customer feedback to focus explicitly and exclusively on those issues and experiences that create

memorable and meaningful impressions is then the first major step in building a CX strategy rooted in differentiation.

Filtering customer feedback for indicators of key issues in existing experiences can help develop criteria to address issues of greater importance to customers that affect their loyalty behavior.

Implementation

Identify and prioritize only those experiences that shape customers future loyalty behavior, redesign to improve touchpoints and innovate moments that impact customer’s journey and increase efficiency and impact by reducing support issues.

Relevant Instance: (CCW)

See how our team made improvements to the customer experience within the complex multi-stage customer journey by reducing customer uncertainty, minimizing friction and providing proactive updates that increased efficiency all while providing a seamless experience.

Boosting customers’ confidence in their progress toward their broader goals helped create positive, long-lasting memories.

Strategy 2

Recognize and enable customer self-affirmation

There is a need to shift gears from fixing low-impact customer pain points to creating experiences that reinforce the customer’s confidence in their decision to purchase the company’s products/services.

Solutions

Focus on innovating new experiences that amplify the value customers receive from their purchase and provide self-confirmation that they have made the right choice.

Implementation

Create touchpoints that reduce customers’ tendency to consider alternative options by enabling them to affirm the wisdom of their choice.

These can be done by way of

	Showing accomplishment Like celebrating noteworthy moments or highlighting progress to engage users at a deeper level and feel a sense of involvement in the whole process.
	Enabling exploration For customers like in the prepurchase phase where the user is provided the ability to make comparisons between the presented choices that increases their confidence in the eventual purchase.
	Guiding towards success By reducing complexity and uncertainty by providing a clear plan/steps towards achievement of user goals.
	Allowing for flexibility and in-experience adjustments Help customers use the product/service on their own terms.
	Providing added bonus or unexpected benefits That surpass customers expectation and can improve their experience and make them feel validated in their choices.

There is no need to implement all options

Making even minimal and incremental improvements to the customer experience along these lines can make a meaningful difference.

As part of a broader effort to increase adoption, we worked with HPE to make incremental improvements by redesigning their platform that is intuitive enough, where less guidance is needed by providing clear steps towards achievement of goals and by reducing complexity.

Relevant Instance: HPE

Strategy 3

Develop and implement self-sustaining operations and practices

Progressive Organizations need to implement practices that not only facilitate and enable the development of new ideas and designs, but also standardize and routinize the innovation process.

Collection and analysis of customer feedback fuels the process of ideating solutions. Customer insights gathered from a combination of VOC and in-depth qualitative research prepares the ground to brainstorm and create solutions that satisfy unstated customer needs.

Solution

There are two key practices that need to be adhered to.

Following a disciplined process for identifying opportunities, ideating solutions, prioritizing projects and building and testing new experiences that is key to scaling innovation. This analytics-driven approach provides a quantified and systematic view into the problems, opportunity areas, and channel interactions across customer base, enabling organizations to support a systematic journey-improvement cycle.
A customer-focused rather than a company-focused approach to identifying opportunities, ideating solutions and prioritizing. Experience-centered organizations keep the customer journey at the heart of decision-making, which enables them to foster empathy with customers and helps build great digital and cross-touchpoint customer experiences.

CX Assets to speed up Delivery

Overall, only 24% of service firms innovate in new products or services, compared to more than a third of manufacturing firms (36 percent) NESTA report 2008

Organizations are looking at new ways/methods of working to speed up delivery. Customer expectations have never been higher but we don't have to give up efficiencies to exceed their expectations.

Intelligaia provides the tools, methods and systems that act as accelerators for more digitized, resilient and agile CX solutions to proactively monitor and optimize service and product experiences.

Intelligaia adheres to a Design Thinking Methodology about the Customer Experience and also Employee Experience. Our accelerator assets/methods developed specifically to support the design and/or delivery of business include:

"Good user interface is such a good conversation starter. It talks, you listen...in silent whispers. Charming. Empowering and so promising.”
Cheena Kaul
Co-Founder, Intelligaia

Using data driven insights in a unique way for each client to enable more specific decisions through personalization, create better recommendations more quickly and at a lower cost and be more flexible by allowing a solution that demonstrates a custom outcome while leveraging insights across a broad client base.

"By 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.”
Gartner

Adopting machine learning in data driven consulting assets to identify the hidden patterns.

Following a structured approach to Design Operations with activities from Iterative Design Sprints, UX Mapping Workshops to Design Reviews help cross-functional teams to collaborate on the product vision.

Read our e-Book and discover how Design Ops keep design aligned with the business and facilitate framework and processes that increase quality, enable collaboration and support ongoing innovation.

“Truly appreciate everyone coming together, making this your ‘own product’ and the personal sacrifices made to bring this to life. This is not a trivial effort by any stretch of imagination and there have been challenges from Day 1 till date. What got us through to this point is all your passion, commitment and ability to take the challenges head-on no matter how daunting it may be."
CX Director
Cisco

Lead by creating a high impact CX Design Strategy

In an increased competitive market where organizations are facing internal and external pressure to create innovative and differentiated customer experience to help build customer loyalty, there is a need to adopt a CX Design Strategy that centers on differentiated experience and capitalize on opportunity for innovation, salience and impact.

Working with a human-centered Design partner like Intelligaia can help your organization articulate and define your CX strategy to make sure that you’re providing real value to your customers, not just for today, but well into the new normal.

To scale new business with CX Strategy and improve and reinvent established ones.

	Building Design Systems from scratch or on top of existing systems that enterprises can use for a pervasive experience across different business units facilitating verification and consistency.
	Developing plugins for tools like Figma to enable smooth handover between cross functional teams and for tracking feedback leading to faster design iterations. With the useful features and ease of operation, this Comment Export Plugin is surely a boon for designers using Figma.

	Competency in developing a multi experience component system to include all the necessary elements like search, navigation, KPIs, grids, forms, page layouts, error management, alerts and notifications.
	Employing CX Methods to help users make fewer errors through design. Products that are forgiving helps prevent errors before they occur allowing users to feel more confident, secure, and eager to continue to explore.