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Customer experience

Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. (source: Wikipedia)

You’re doing customer experience innovation wrong

Walk the CX talk.

“Everyone talks about customer experience innovation, but no one knows quite what it is or how to attain it. In fact, when we ask customer experience professionals how they’re driving their innovation efforts, we find several misguided approaches that actually thwart differentiation and waste massive amounts of time and money in the process.”

(Kerry Bodine ~ HBR blog)

Designing for services beyond the screen

CX design thinking to the rescue.

“(…) services aren’t made on an assembly line. They are complex and difficult to get right, because your users might interact with the service across a wide array of touchpoints. You can’t predict precisely which of them each user will need, in what order she will encounter them, and who will help her along the way. The service is experienced differently by every person, because every person is different.”

(Andy Polaine a.k.a. @apolaine ~ A List Apart)

The future of human-centered design

Copernicus and his heliocentrism are getting a lot of traction these days with outside-in thinking.

“HCD has been a breakthrough for our industry – it’s repositioned design as a tool to help transform product development by ensuring customer’s needs are met and also by helping to uncover people’s latent needs (those not surfaced by traditional focus groups for instance). We are taught to think about the world in three lenses as designers: desirability – what people want, feasibility – the capabilities of a firm, and viability – its financial health.”

(Nathan Waterhouse a.k.a. @natwaterhouse ~ Firm follows form)

Measuring customer experience

Business pressure leads to CX quantification. What else can they see in CX?

“Since customer experience is so important, shouldn’t we all want to know how our digital products, services, and interactions compare to those of our competitors? Are they sparkling examples of interactive delight that rival those of the CX champions or more like the punch-in-the-face customers get when they deal with health-plan providers?”

(Ben Werner ~ UXmatters)

Softer side of change

Design thinking representing the soft side? The human side.

“Businesses have always looked at ways to improve, to either save cost or improve operating performance. The drive for improvement is even greater today due to the current economic climate we find ourselves in. Traditional buzz words such as process re-engineering and process improvement are becoming part of every day language once again, as organisations try to become leaner. The challenge faced by organisations when applying these improvement techniques is that the world we find ourselves in today is very different to when these approaches were first defined. Organisations are no longer stand alone entities, most are now part of a large ecosystem with complex interdependencies, spread in some cases across the globe.”

(Mike Clark ~ Bridging the Gap)

Associating UX changes to the Net Promoter Score

Or connecting UX with CX in a quantitative way.

“A bad experience will impact how likely users are to recommend a website or product to a friend. Fixing those bad experiences is critical to increasing positive word of mouth. Unfortunately, there are usually too many things to fix and just as many opinions on what should be fixed. Development teams need to prioritize.”

(Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MeasuringU ~ Measuring Usability) ~ courtesy of barbarakoop

Design in service: Crafting the citizen experience

Government, the service provider avant-la-lettre. Now it’s time for transformational CXs.

“Many agree that a combination of factors – a demand for better user experience, the rise of ubiquitous technologies and more readily accessible datasets – present the conditions necessary for a more enjoyable life as a citizen of our country. But necessity is just the mother of invention; it takes hard work to get there. To narrow the gap between today’s promises and tomorrow’s opportunities, designers are increasingly intent on improving what’s known as the citizen experience.”

(Andrew Maier a.k.a. @andrewmaier ~ UX Booth)

The widening gulf of customer experience

Hype, silver bullet or market opportunity, CX is a serious, complex, and holistic business.

“Without commitment, promising a focus on the customer widens the gap between expectations and delivery. This leads to disappointment for shareholders, who will not see the long-term financial returns expected, and for customers whose experience below expectations will be perceived as worse than if no promise was made in the first place. This may explain why some of the most successful, and most loved companies do not try to differentiate themselves with a promise of better customer experience. In fact they rarely even use the word. Instead, they focus on the actual delivery of it.”

(David Jacques a.k.a. @DavidJacques ~ Customer Input)

Improving UX with customer journey maps

CX or UX? Who cares. Users are customers for capitalists.

“The necessity of providing user satisfaction on every key touchpoint in your business is critical to your success. The issue, however, is identifying those crucial touchpoints. Customer journey maps could be an incredibly helpful solution in this area.”

(Jacek Samsel ~ Six Revisions) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano

UX design, role-playing and micromoments

The theatre metaphor provides so much inspiration, insight and knowledge.

“Good interaction design is about attending to every moment that passes between a person and the device (or system, or service) with which he or she is interacting. These moments can be explicit, as with gestures, taps, a button-click, or the completion of a form field. Or, these moments may be more elusive, such as a pause while you try and understand what is being asked of you or how to answer. It’s these internal conversations that users have at any given moment that often get overlooked.”

(Stephen P. Anderson ~ UIE)

Feeling, thinking, doing Service Design

Service design as the vehicle for adding corporate value: E2 (‘Experience Engineering’).

“I believe that the strategic process of experience engineering is why it is imperative that the benefits of Service Design are communicated to and supported by people working at the highest organisational business level.”

(Richard Arnott a.k.a. @servicejunkie ~ Curiosity Junkie)

Strategy and online: How online is changing the game and the playing field for strategy development

A great piece on being successful online, every designer, manager and marketeer should read.

“Strategy is about trying to take control and trying to win. Strategy is about trying to predict the future or at least enough of that future that will give you a competitive advantage. Strategy is about being specific. It is about helping you get from A to C by doing B. It’s about putting your cards on the table, placing your bets.”

(Gerry McGovern ~ CustomerCareWords)

To Dwell Is To Garden: An empathic approach to employee experience design

CX being driven by the EX.

“The methods of experience design uniquely situate experience designers to address employee disengagement in textured ways. By uncovering the root behavioral causes and co-producing solutions with employees, experience designers can create the right kind of resources, which empower organizations to own their desired change over time. As employee experience design is not a tidy activity, this article will focus less on concrete deliverables or step-by-step how-to-recommendations. Instead, a working framework is presented to assist experience designers in thinking through their own process-centric approaches and solutions.”

(Liana Dragoman a.k.a. @ldragoman ~ UX Magazine)

The management of experience design

Finding what you’re looking for implies you know what to look for.

“The customer experience, in all its different facets, is moving into the focus of innovation management.(…) Firms have started abandoning the transactional and product-oriented view of customer relationships. Instead, they have begun to design and align all their interactions with a customer so that consistent experience cycles evolve. Practical product functions are becoming a commodity and the communicational functions as well as the symbolic environment are becoming competitive differentiators. The product is thus merely one element to develop and is to be embedded in an equally important environment of consistent and meaningful customer touch points. The key challenge for firms is to handle the dispersion of responsibilities for relevant touch points across functions and business partners. Therefore, this research explores the means for an effective management of the experience design activities.”

(Torsten Lars Brodt)

New frontiers: The UX professional as business consultant

Business, the new hunting ground for UX professionals.

“We talk a lot about cross-channel experiences and how to address these new challenges as designers, but what about using our design skills, our hard won knowledge and empathy for customers to help companies decide what products and services will help grow their business? While companies are coming round to the value of customer experience, they’re struggling to acquire the skills needed for creating and managing touch points as well as understanding and prioritizing needs. And when we’re talking multi-channel ecosystems, who’s better equipped to address this complexity than those who have the skill set to not only understand it, but to design it and guide how it’s built. From optimizing the cross-channel customer experience, to creating new product and service extensions, we’re heading into a prime moment for bringing our toolkit into the business arena. This talk is meant to be both a thought starter as well as a lively group discussion around how UX can begin to play a substantive role in a company’s digital strategy. Using examples from my own experiences and input from a variety of seasoned practitioners, we’ll examine the challenges and map the opportunities across our own journey as UX professionals who are starting to think about what’s next.”

(Cindy Chastain a.k.a. @cchastain ~ Interaction 13)

Five must-dos in designing an emotionally engaging experience

It’s so easy. It just takes five.

“As customers’ expectations change rapidly driven not just from you, or what happens in your industry but also by other companies they deal with who lead the way (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Starbucks etc.) you need to constantly innovate. There are fewer innovations when people are afraid to do errors. We have recently gathered former clients from different parts of the world who had a success with their customer experience programs and one thing was common that led to their success – the room for trial and error they had.”

(Zhecho Dobrev a.k.a. @Zhecho_BeyondP ~ Beyond philosophy)