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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)

Perspectives in Experience Design

Well done, Milan!

“For me, the word Experience in the context of Design work refers to the way people experience the world, and making everything we produce fit into their lives. The word preceding Experience is about the perspective you use when talking about someone’s experience, the roles and the scope you want to focus on. For an enterprise, this translates to the ways it chooses to appear in people’s lives.”

(Milan Guenther a.k.a. @eda__c ~ Blurring Boundaries)

Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do You Do It?

The next silver bullet for companies: appoint a CXO.

“Method’s Reuben Steiger offers five ways for creating an ecosystem of products and services — and thinking like a chief experience officer. (…) The days of perfect plans within a top-down hierarchy are over. Instead, we need to influence our companies to embrace shared values and product principles. Then, each of us can be a chief experience officer creating memorable experiences and a cohesive, engaging, and delightful brand.”

(Reuben Steiger a.k.a. @method_inc ~ Fast Co.Design) ~ courtesy of nicoooooon

How to transform vision into value

Service design connects here to customer experience.

Presentation – “This presentation shines the light on what’s missing in turning A customer experience vision into tangible business value. How do you use all that is good and useful from typical customer experience approaches? How do you add commercial rigour and the hard core analytics in a way that one competency doesn’t dominate the other? What is the secret in bringing together the skills and perspectives that result in a great customer experience and an equally great commercial outcome?”

(Damian Kernahan a.k.a. @protopartners ~ Proto Partners)

A(nother) call to action regarding healthcare

Again a broken 20th century institution to refocus on experience: the PX

“In my view, UX designers can do more. Learn about the problematic healthcare cultural characteristics that dominate and that need to change. Alter how you do design research. Don’t limit yourself to incremental innovation and work that is narrowly focused on UIs. Question the advisability of doing projects that, in essence, only amount to putting lipstick on the very large healthcare pig. Escape your comfort zones in order to have the kind of impact on the world that you desire.”

(Richard Anderson a.k.a. @riander)

Customer experience: The natural ally for UX in business

One of my rare original blogposts.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands) ~ “In this post, I would like to talk about what has been on my mind for the last year or two: the relationship between user experience and customer experience and how user experience designers can extend their influence in businesses.”

(Peter Bogaards a.k.a. @BogieZero ~ βiRDS on a W!RE)

User Experience Is The Heart Of Any Company. How Do You Make It Top Priority?

Calling it ‘Customer Experience’ might help.

“The closer you are to your customers, the more relevant your product will be and the more likely you make it for people to choose you. It may seem obvious, but the gap between those that do and those that talk is widening, despite the immediate bottom-line benefits. But more than this, companies that put usefulness at the heart of what they do become part of their customers’ lives. Engaging with customers then becomes an ongoing conversation, rather than the stop-start involvement that characterized the 20th century. This makes it much easier for customers to come back, and keep coming back.”

(Mary Ellen Muckerman ~ FastCo)

Extending the Experience Beyond the Device

And beyond technology as well. All through design.

“Over the last few years, the popularity of UX has grown by leaps and bounds. Companies have come to realize the importance of offering engaging experiences to their users, lest they risk losing them to competitors that have invested time and money into improving their product and service experiences. An interesting side effect of this enhanced focus on UX is that it has helped make users more sophisticated. This, however, can be a double-edged sword; as users become more sophisticated their expectations also increase, and UX professionals must find new ways to meet these elevated expectations. One way to achieve this is to extend the experience beyond the device.”

(Tim R. Todish a.k.a. @t3b ~ UX Magazine)

Is your organization design ready?

The idea remains: UX is an organizational challenge, not a design one.

“Let’s presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.”

(Chris Noessel a.k.a. @chrisnoessel ~ Cooper Journal) ~ courtesy of willemijnprins

Design Factory: Creative Design with Industrial Approach

Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

“Digital strategy touches every fiber of your operation. We firmly believe that it takes a systematic approach that’s woven into your organizational fabric to deliver compelling customer experiences – an approach comprising a recurring cycle of ideation, design, development and evaluation (…) The Design Factory is a methodical, structured design capability that comprises people, processes and tools. It infuses your organization with the creativity, agility and efficiency to successfully execute your digital strategy – from conceiving innovative solutions through to using robust and scalable approaches for design and specification.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

Forrester Report: Digital Customer Experience Improvement Requires A Systematic Approach

Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

Industrialize Processes In Support Of A Digital Customer Experience Strategy – “To consistently meet or exceed customers’ expectations, firms must take a systematic approach to digital customer experience management. In conducting in-depth interviews with 16 business professionals, Forrester found that several of these companies had adopted some best practices for digital design that delivered improvements in customer experience – leading to improved business results through increased revenues, improved loyalty, greater customer engagement, and reduced costs. However, no organization had a mature, systematic approach to consistently differentiate through superior digital customer experience. For firms to turn their digital customer experience into a sustainable source of competitive advantage, they must define a digital customer experience strategy and introduce robust tools and repeatable methodologies to support it.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

The Key To A Unified Brand: A Consistent UI

Marketing, brands and business discovering HCI rapidly. A little late, but still…

“The end user doesn’t care how your company is structured. Customers view brands as a unified entity, and they expect that brand’s value to be delivered across all channels with an equal degree of integrity. The good news is that the digital landscape is forcing all of us to re-think how we work. The bad news is that we’re trying to crawl out of a work style that was better designed for Ford’s assembly line than for digital ecosystem consistency.”

(Peyton Lindley ~ Fast Company Co.Design)

Why User Experience Is Different From Consumer Experience

CX or/versus/and UX? It’s in the air. Consumer of customer, that’s (still) the question.

“Forrester recently released a report on the rise of the Chief Customer Officer. The emergence of a C-level role with authority over customers’ interactions has caused much hand-wringing within the UX community. It’s like the job (we think) we’re made for has been stolen from us.”

(Greg Laugero a.k.a. @prodctstrategy ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) ~ courtesy of schilletje

Tools supporting the design process

Cross-channel becomes touchpoint orchestration.

Example: Touchpoint orchestration ~ “Consumers interact with companies in many different ways. They may receive corporate information through publicity in the media, they see brand advertisements on TV or in magazines, they interact with personnel during the buying process or at the customer service desk, they unwrap packaged goods, they sample products in stores, and so on. Ideally, the different design elements that consumers experience should work together like the instruments in an orchestra to create the overall experience. Just like the instruments in the orchestra each have a different character, the design elements do not need to be similar in order to work together in creating a great and engaging experience. Touchpoint orchestration makes sure that all different elements work together and in the right order, in order to create the desired user experience.”

(Experience Driven Innovation)

Convenience: The third essential of a customer-centric business

Never seen ‘convenience’ as a quality attribute for user experience, like usable, useful or desirable.

“Technology and innovative design have made many products and services more predictable and efficient, the two lower levels of Different’s 7 Essentials of Customer Experience. Convenience, the next essential of customer experience, is a critical factor in determining how customers make decisions about what to buy, what services to use, where to go, and with whom to engage. Conventional wisdom says that convenience is a factor of time and effort. On the surface, that’s true, but if you dig a little deeper to fully understand service convenience, you need to consider another factor: perception.”

(Ari Weissman a.k.a. @TravelingRE ~ UX Magazine)

Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships

See, UX gets picked up by the ‘big guru guys’. Let’s see what they do with it.

“User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy. (…) User experience is now becoming a critical point in customer engagement in order to compete for attention now and in the future. For without thoughtful UX, consumers meander without direction, reward, or utility. And their attention, and ultimately loyalty, follows.”

(Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis ~ Fast Company)