Customer Experience Design — The Way to a Perfect Customer Experience

As technology advances, customers have access to a lot more information than they used to a decade before. They no longer depend on the in-store search of products, rather they do their homework.

According to UXMag, 49% of customers research a product before even making a decision to purchase. Thanks to the internet, everything is just a click away.

With such power at their hands, customers are no longer slaves to what they are offered. Instead, they know what they want and they know where to get it. So the question is, are you the brand that understands the customer’s mind and offers what’s needed?

Well if not, you should be!!!

Because Customer Experience is no more limited only to the activities carried on to ease the customer journey in your organization. Rather it starts way before a customer even interacts with your brand.

That’s why organizations like yours need to plan their customer experience strategy using the concept of Customer Experience Design.

Now to know what’s that, how to create that, and a million other questions, keep reading…

Customer Experience Design: The Meaning

A quick Customer Experience Design definition will help you understand the concept better.

In simple terms, it means to design and create products and/or services in a way that aligns with customer needs, generates utility, and adds to the overall Customer Experience.

A normal Customer Experience Strategy usually focuses on identifying the pain points in the customer journey and finding ways to remedy them. But, what’s needed is a proactive approach that creates a customer experience framework to focus on CX improvement at all touchpoints, so that pain never arises.

Customer Experience Design is that approach. The goal is not to just sell the product, but to sell the experience and thereby sell the product in the aftermath.

According to Lucidpress statistics, 67% of customers expect a great customer experience from a brand.

And to live up to their expectations it is necessary to know how to create a good CX design.

But first, let’s understand why CX design is so important…

Why Customer Experience Design?

Designing your customer experience framework beforehand gives you a lead in your customer experience management. There are multiple reasons behind this:

• Prepared for Unknown: Using a proactive customer experience strategy to remain ready for anything that might affect the customers negatively in their journey helps you make a move quickly.
  If things go right, you have a strategy in place to push the product for sale. If things go wrong, you still have a backup ready. With a planned CX design you’re always prepared for all situations, beforehand.
• Customer Satisfaction Increases: A well-planned customer experience framework will ensure that the customer returns home with your product and great happiness.
  According to Customer Thermometer, 70% of customers prefer brands that offer them value with a great experience. CX design can thus help in enhancing Customer Satisfaction.
• Happy Customer is a Loyal Customer: According to Zendesk, a positive customer experience induces about 52% of customers to make additional purchases from a brand. So, a well-curated customer experience strategy can lead to brand loyalty and repetitive purchases.
  Retaining customers is always cost-effective than creating new ones. Existing satisfied customers also generate positive reviews and bring in new customers too.
• Measurable CX (ROI): Increasing customer satisfaction can help to create greater ROI. According to McKinsey, the satisfaction of customers can increase revenue by 15% and reduced customer serving costs by 20%. It is therefore important to have proper customer experience management to improve the revenue and profits of your brand.
• Lead over Competition: Last but not the least, a great customer experience strategy can help you gain a lead over your competition. Statistics from Qualtrics prove that companies that focus on Customer Experience Design outperform 80% of their competition in terms of market share and revenue.

Thus, a defined customer experience framework based on planning can ease customer experience management for your business and generate manifold benefits.

These benefits can be the reality of your CX if you know how to create a customer experience design…

How to Enhance Customer Experience Management using Customer Experience Design?

For proper CX management, a well-structured customer experience framework is a must. To go about it, here are some tips to create a great customer experience strategy:

Identify Customer Personas

Your customers would belong to diverse segments. But there will be something they have in common. Grouping your customers based on some specific criteria creates customer personas.

For instance, as a brand of sports shoes, your major customer persona will be focused on the young population aged between 12–45, interested in fitness or sports.

Defining such personas will help you strategize your customer experience framework around the tastes and preferences of your target segment and understand them better at a psychological level.

Empathy Mapping

Once the personas are sorted, it will become easy to understand the beliefs, emotions, principles, and other factors that drive your customers’ behavior. Empathy Mapping in customer experience management uses 4 quadrants:

• Think: what is your customers’ thought process. For instance, in India people consider cows to be holy.
• Feel: what they feel about their thoughts. Indians feel eating beef is a sin as cows are holy animals.
• Say: how they express their feeling. Indians, hence, have laws to protect cows and are vocal about the issue of cow slaughtering.
• Do: their actions based on their thoughts. Indians won’t welcome a brand that uses beef in their products.

That is why when Mc Donald’s entered India, it had to design a new product for the Indian market: the Mc Aloo Tikki.

This is because McD’s main product used beef which would not be welcome in India. Empathy Mapping can help in creating a customized Customer Experience Strategy.

Analyze Customer Journey

Monitoring customers throughout their journey can reveal interesting insights about their pain points. It will also highlight the most important touchpoints where customers spend the most time.

These can be targeted for improvement and changes. Customers also tend to leave certain cues about their preferences at these touchpoints. This information can be used to personalize your customer experience design.

Feedbacks and Revision

Customers will always let you know when something goes wrong. Their feedback is a good source to understand your areas of improvement. The feedbacks will also guide other customers.

So, acting upon them is a must. Collect these feedbacks and compile them based on similar pain points. This will reveal the Key Pain Areas that need to be taken care of urgently. Revise your customer experience management plan and accordingly address their grievances.

Customer Experience Design Training

Customer Experience Design can be a new concept for many internal team members who are required to interact with customers daily like, the support team, sakes team, demo team, etc.

Using Customer Experience Design Training can help you impart knowledge about your CX models, CX strategies, and CX framework with your internal customers.

A centralized flow of such information will help your sales representatives and support teams to prepare themselves and deal with the customers accordingly to achieve all your CX goals.

Keeping Employee Journey Mapping in Mind

Lastly, do not forget the internal customers. Keep in mind the impact that these changes in CX strategies can bring to your employee journey mapping process.

Prepare your employees with customer experience design training so that they can make the appropriate decisions when needed. This will reduce any resistance to change and fear of low performance.

According to Forbes, companies with a higher Customer Experience index have 1.5 times more engaged employees.

Thus, CX can be used to increase your overall employee journey mapping index.

Final Words…

Customer Experience is evolving rapidly on a daily basis. And with more organizations competing with their CX efforts, it becomes mandatory to think out of the box.

A good idea is to be proactive with the help of Customer Experience Design. Knowing what your customers want, when they want, and how to achieve that is the key to a successful Customer Experience Strategy.

Hopefully, now you understand the customer experience design definition and why it is so important for your business. The tips for creating CX Design will definitely help you get a long way ahead. Just keep a balance between Customer and Employee Experiences and you’ll be just fine!