Friday, October 17, 2008

Inside Product Design & Development

Factor the full customer experience in design

Every day, your customers are either retained or lost because of seemingly insignificant experiences they have in relation to your company. Consider the myriad touch points that represent opportunities to experience your brand. What type of experience will your customers have today? Will their loyalty be cemented because of a helpful customer service call, or will a frustrating online experience drive them into the arms of a competitor?

Enter experience design. Experience design is the discipline dedicated to architecting interactions with technology, which satisfy user needs while also creating business results.

Imagine a company whose customer service group has recently determined that their average cost-per-online transaction was much less than their average cost-per-phone transaction. As a result, the company decides to launch a channel migration initiative. Their first course of action may be to redesign the website to address the simple completion of a user’s top goals. While this tactic may help, it is unlikely to maximize the return on investment. To gain the full benefit from channel migration, all customer touch points must be considered, designed, adjusted and evolved. Sources of frustration and inquiry need to be investigated. Identify what drove a given customer to pick up the phone. Only then will you maximize the value for both the business and customers.

Experience design is accomplished via thoughtfully designed multi-channel experience diagrams, which are similar to storyboards, comic strips, or even a screenplay. These experience diagrams demonstrate how technology would ideally weave its way into a person’s actual context of use. They are informed by analytically oriented activities, which yield insight about customers, including audience segmentation, personas, customer surveys, contextual inquiry, market research, heuristic analysis and usability testing. The diagrams represent the creative solution-oriented thinking necessary to balance customer goals with business objectives while taking technical considerations and limitations into account. In our above example, each diagram follows a person through the experience of receiving a communication, calling the call center, and/or visiting a website. The goal of each scenario is to push a key performance indicator in a desirable direction, while increasing the likelihood of customer retention.

Does your company need to enhance its focus on cross-channel experience design? The following are some symptoms of the need to start:

• Your marketing, sales, technology and operational divisions all have their own approach to meeting customer goals, with little collaboration on best practices.
• You are unsure how people get to your website or where they drop off, why people call the call center when they could have easily gone online, which e-mails are going to which prospects/customers, and how they move your key performance indicators.
• You are embarrassed by your company’s account statements and printed materials.
• Your designers have never stepped foot in your call center, spoken with sales staff, technology experts, product managers or marketing directors.

Experience design may not yet be understood within your organization. The value may not be clear, or customer experience may not be a focus. However, all is not lost. There are ways to integrate cross-channel experience design thinking into your company.

• Organically form a multi-disciplinary “customer experience” team, with volunteers from sales, marketing, technology, finance and operations.
• Make experience design a staff member’s responsibility, or area of focus.
• Hire an experience design firm to build a governance strategy and process which you can “grow into” as a future approach.
• During your next design initiative for a channel, consider what could happen before or after a customer’s experience across other channels. Ask questions which drive thinking in that regard.
• Perhaps most important, talk to your customers.

Traditionally, responsibilities for printed company collateral, advertising, web design and outbound e-mail communications have resided in marketing; account statement creation and call center management in operations; and application interface design and product design in technology. When individual departments are responsible for their own area, the experience that links all customer touch points together is not considered holistically. A focus on experience design can provide your company with the system, practice and approach for ensuring that all customer touch points to “hang together” in a meaningful way providing competitive differentiation.

 

Amy Cueva is founder and chief experience officer with Mad*Pow Media Solutions LLC in Portsmouth, N.H.