Customer eXperience or CX is what everyone is focusing on today. Yet, why do many organizations stumble in the delivery or execution? We have been talking about CX by design since 2015 but many organizations are still not prepared. Overall CX has fallen back to traditional methods and solutions or even when the customer journey is mapped out, organizations constantly fail to see it from the customer’s perspective. We have seen it before. CX needs to be user experience. It is called Customer Experience, not Organization’s Experience.
Our Approach
- Exceptional customer experience (CX) cannot be delivered without a holistic picture of the brand promise and with siloed CX and design teams.
- Business and Process transformation is futile without insights and a customer-centered design. CX has to be by design; with and for the customer in mind.
- To deliver a seamless customer experience, a total customer experience design approach with journey mapping and a customer-centric approach is able to create the kind of experience that accurately reflects your organization’s brand promise.
Today’s world is one with high consumer expectations and increased competition. It no longer becomes a product or service competitive offering but it is now all about the experience. We have talked about it before. Customers are fickle and they are loyal not to brands but to The Better Experience – CXO.
Organizations trying to navigate the CX maze find themselves investing and innovating but not really delivering the experience customers demand and expect. This is because of the reactionary approach most organizations have. There is no seamless vision, no brand promise that they must fulfill at all times, and generally, a badly planned approach to the customer experience.
At Brandt, our approach to CX has always been holistic. We start with the Brand promise and then we map the customer journeys. Then we design the experience around the customer. A complete CX by Designed methodology that utilizes insights, customer research, solution design, analytics, measurements, and more. We involve everyone because CX is not the responsibility of Customer Care or the customer-facing staff. It is the responsibility of everyone from the CEO down.
A comprehensive CX design effort and approach can better capture all the nuances of the many customer journeys to produce a seamless experience, from end to end. We also include a lot of reporting and analytics because the design must measure up to the customer expectations and what we design and build need to be constantly evaluated and improved quickly.
A unified CX-design approach allows organizations to see gaps and other disconnects quickly. We use our journey maps, deep-dive into customer insights, and surveys to see how your brand is interacting with customers through each and every touchpoint. Each silo may be performing well, such as illustrated below. Your website or contact center may do well, but if you look at companies such as Apple that deliver an exceptional experience, it’s the whole experience that matters to the customer.
Remember also with the rise and growth of digital, the user interface or UX is equally important in the drive to deliver an exceptional experience. We also need to be clear that CX design is quite different from Service design (we will discuss this in a future article) and UX design. Suffice to say that Service design focuses on the how and UX design is focused on the touchpoints or interaction points.
From our experience, organizations trying to improve and focus on CX should take conduct a deep discovery activity. You really need to know what your customers want and need as well as all your touchpoints. This needs to be blended in with your brand, vision, and purpose.
The end goal is to deliver impact to your customers as this is where the value lies. Successful organizations delivering impact are the ones reaping the rewards of a loyal customer base that is now a strong brand advocate. This is how you transform a business with CX by design.
Our recommendations for a CX design approach
In order to have a successful CX by Design approach, organizations can utilize what we have found to be extremely useful and applicable below. This applies across to most industries, even B2B businesses. The goal here is that the outcome must strongly impact customer experience in order to reap the business value.
Our Approach
- Top-down involvement. You won’t get departments to cooperate if the CEO does not. Make sure you get the big picture and connect it back to your organization’s vision, brand promise, and core values.
- Remember humanity. Digital, AI, and bots are everywhere but your customers are still human. You must factor the humanity into your CX strategy.
- As part of the process, the entire organization needs to pivot to a customer-center model. CX is everyone’s responsibility.
- Measure across, not vertically. The customer doesn’t care about the channel. If you do an NPS or VoC, it needs to track the entire customer journey.
- Plan on the plan changing. No plan survives day one. Stay agile.
Intentional CX by design will enable companies to move from purely measuring and analyzing consumer insights and reacting to them to proactively creating the desired customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle journey.
