Page Contents
The customer experience includes all the steps of the customer journey, from feeling the need for the product to returning to it. Creating the best experience on this path will make the customer understand your brand differentiation. Customer experience design (also known as CX design) is the creation of the best events for the customer.
So let’s dig a little deeper and learn more about customer experience.
What is customer experience design?
Customer experience design is the creation of the best events through customers’ journeys.
When we talk about customer experience design, we are not necessarily looking for creating a brand new revenue model for a business. Experience design is usually sought after by businesses that offer a minimum of acceptable services to customers and seek to better present their brand. They also may be looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing unique experiences to customers.
In particular, throughout the development of each business, new needs and demands are raised by customers, many of which may not necessarily lead to the formation of a new service but to a new way of providing service.
Customer experience design and your revenue model
Sometimes creating a new experience means changing the revenue model and business strategy. For some time now, many of the world’s economies have entered a new phase called the experience economy.
At this stage, there is a strong product infrastructure and service, and one or more experienced businesses with that infrastructure offer their services to their customers. Another area of competition of these businesses is to create a distinct experience that is tied to the brand identity of each. It does not necessarily involve improving their service.
The goal is to differentiate services in a way that creates the best experience for the preferred customer of each business.
This usually results in the definition of a new line of experience alongside the continuation of the previous business, and sometimes the whole business shifts to a new revenue model.
But whether customer experience design leads to a change in revenue model or not, experience design for the customer will not work if any of the following has fundamental problems:
- The principle of the service provided
- The current path of service received by the customer
- Or parts of the defined product and service are missing.
So if you have not yet done the process of designing or modifying your product or service or have been planning to improve your service for a long time but have not had the opportunity, start designing the service first.
The service design process itself enhances the customer experience to the point where it improves work standards. You can then design the consumer experience to move towards the ideal of the brand.
Aim of the customer experience design
In customer experience designs that are based on the organization’s strategy and its brand identity, operational and innovative solutions are implemented. These kinds of solutions lead to improving the customer experience and thus may increase their loyalty to the organization.
The aim of designing experience is not just pleasing the external customers of the organization, and designing an experience can also affect the experience of the organization’s employees.
What is NOT customer experience design?
Customer experience design is not a technique for measuring customer satisfaction, but analyzing the current customer experience of receiving services or using products is the first step in this process.
The difference between experience design and customer satisfaction is that the latter, based on customer feedback about the service or product, decides which part of the organization to devote more resources to and how to eliminate potential operational shortcomings to maintain customer satisfaction.
Customer experience design project
As for service design projects, we go through four general stages:
- Cognition and discovery
- Defining the main issue of the customer experience
- Ideation of different experiences and development of ideas
- Implementing the experience and improving it
Similarities between customer experience design, UX design, and design thinking
Customer experience design has many similarities to user experience design (UX). While user experience design focuses on creating the best product usage experience for the user, customer experience design makes a brand’s customer experience better every time a customer interacts with it.
The main goal of a customer experience design program is to align business goals, strategies, and customer interaction with a brand for a consistent and positive experience during the customer journey.
While there are many similarities between designing a customer experience and using design thinking for the customer journey, they are not the same! Both processes are repetitive and never end, and each process involves brainstorming, prototyping, testing, reviewing, and then starting the whole process over and over again.
Moreover, both are based on empathy and understanding the customer’s need to build a positive emotional experience. While design thinking for the customer experience involves providing a solution to a specific customer pain point or pain points, customer experience design seeks to design an optimal experience for the brand and product that accompanies the complete customer journey.
What is the customer experience design process like?
What is important for a customer experience design initiative is to create the customer’s persona and journey in quantitative and qualitative ways. Consider the beginning and end of the journey, which may not be relevant to the organization.
From there, determine which stages are left out and set up a plan, and review them. Once this is done, the customer experience design process involves identifying contact points where improvements can be made.
A thorough understanding of the customer journey is the most important part of the customer experience design process, and it takes time and effort to do so. The target audience must be identified to understand what each customer wants, what they are looking for in the brand experience, and how the brand can best achieve these goals.
By defining the brand’s mission and values and integrating them into the experience, a brand can provide the customer with an emotional connection. A connection that allows them to align with the brand’s values. The main questions to ask about customer journey are:
- How does this particular point of contact make the customer feel?
- How would you like the customer to feel in this particular interaction with the brand?
- What makes the contact point exceptional for the customer?
- What can you do to optimize the point of contact?
There are challenges ahead
Brands that create a customer experience design program will face challenges, but those challenges are solvable. Challenges for an organization during a customer experience design initiative may involve curating and reviewing customers data. As many organizations distribute customer data across multiple systems, finding a customer to talk to, and knowing which data piece is their priority.
Using the Customer Information Platform (CDP) to standardize data streamed across multiple channels and segmentation can simplify the challenges of channel data management.
Each of these efforts can be costly and time-consuming, so it is important to start with what you have and then use an iterative approach to build more customer knowledge and solve customer design problems.
How do you develop customer experience?
Every customer interaction with a brand is part of the customer journey. Customer journey is an integral part of every business process. Whether the customer journey is about car service, buying a new book, or changing home decor, we use human-centered design to discover what matters to the customer and provide solutions and experiences that help them achieve the ultimate satisfaction in having a good experience.
So you need to create a brand that is compatible with all channels. Customer experience channels through which the customer interacts with a brand include store interactions, social events, phone calls, mobile apps, websites, email, and wherever there is a point of contact between the customer and the brand. One approach for brands is to ensure that:
- Customer interacts with the brand
- The experience will be integrated
- The experience will be consistent and positive across all channels
Customer experience design examples
For example, a customer searches a website for a product and discovers the product is also available in local stores. Instead of ordering the product online and waiting for it to be delivered, the customer goes to the local point of sale. When they get to the store, they can not find the same product; only similar products are available.
They return home and once again find the product on the brand website, order it and wait. In this situation, they feel frustrated and a little angry. They wasted their time and money, and now, they have to pay for transportation too. Each sales channel is different, but we should consider it as a whole.his experience was unpleasant for the customer.
Their latest experience with the brand will upset them emotionally. On the other hand, a complete experience makes the customer feel good and satisfied.
Its because they can see on the website that this product is available in the local store. If it was only available online, the website would notify them to prevent them from appearing in the local store in vain.
Establish an emotional connection with each customer
Harvard Business School professor says:
95 percent of our purchase decision-making occurs in the subconscious mind and is emotional.
Gerald Zaltman
To communicate and resonate emotionally, winners must know who their customers are.
Ideally, the design anticipates and then meets the user’s emotional needs. This is exactly what customer experience design is all about: anticipating and then meeting customer needs!
Does your brand have the right tools to start an emotional connection? How can we help a customer find a product, service, or solution that meets their needs? How can we make the process easier for them? What can we do to make the process smooth and enjoyable? How to make the customer feel that they have made a wise choice by doing business with us? How can we make their experiences so exceptional that they feel emotionally positive about our brand?
Get feedback from customers who have used your products or services
To know the quality of the customer experiences, you need to get feedback from your customers. For this purpose, you can use after-sales surveys and communicate with customers who have purchased from your brand. You can do this by email or phone call and get informed of their views.
You should look at the different feedback you receive to understand what actions were taken and what behaviors or actions of the customer support team were involved in generating that feedback. In this way, all members will realize how much their performance can determine the quality of the customer experience.
Use customer experience tools
If you have ever searched for “Best Customer Experience Software” to use for improving your customer journey, you are on the right path. A customer experience tool helps you understand your customer journey, find bugs and U-turns, and even drop-offs.
Imagine being able to observe your visitors and every single interaction they have throughout their journey on your platform. In that case, you can easily understand their pain points and target them for further improvements.
WatchThemLive: Watch your platform through your users’ eyes
WatchThemLive is a web analytics platform to reveal:
- why your visitors aren’t converting to customers
- Why certain users drop-off
- how users interact with the forms or buttons
And many more visual insights that otherwise, you had to guess.
Here are some of the most amazing features of WatchThemLive:
- Session replays
- Heatmaps
- Deep analytics
- Customer segmentation
- Landing page optimization
- Goal tracking
The best thing about WatchThemLive? Our FREE package includes 5,000 pageviews, 5,000 video replays, unlimited heatmap pages, and unlimited Goal tracking.
Evaluate the quality of your employees’ performance in a specific framework
By this point, you should be aware that the quality of the services you provide and the principles you have set out in the first step should be aligned with customers’ views. Next, you need to know about the training needs of each customer support team member.
Many organizations re-evaluate employees’ telephone or email communications with customers to identify these training needs. But you can take this assessment one step further by setting a framework and criteria for measuring quality and helping your employees’ progress through organizational leadership, providing e-learning, and setting up group training sessions.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that customers will demand a consistent, personal and positive emotional experience. This applies to whenever they interact with your brand.
When customers encounter a negative experience, they are more likely to look for alternative brands that meet their needs. Customer experience design enables brands to create an experience that connects the customer to the brand.
This connection happens through positive emotional communication. It makes them feel like they have spent their money on the right products, services, or business solutions.
