Experience Design: Seamless Customer Experience

In the digital age, empowered customers demand customized and seamless customer experience at every touchpoint – be it the physical world or the digital. CX or Customer Experience is the sum of all interactions the customer has during their journey with a brand or product. At each touchpoint, the experience needs to be exceptional and effortless so that the transition from one stage to the other is smooth and enhances customer satisfaction.  For any business, a seamless customer journey is all about putting together a strong framework that allows it to deliver personalized positive experiences to the people they’re doing business with. For this, every individual who is part of the organization must know their customers and understand their needs, even though they may be unexpressed. Employees must be ready to identify and solve a problem even before users identify it. Importance of CX A rational connection or preference is built when customers’ expectations are at least partly met or preferably exceeded at every touchpoint they have with a company over a period of time. The touchpoints could be a website, app, social media, customer service helpline or employees, or even physical stores. An omnichannel buying experience that is satisfying for users, establishes the reputation of the business. Such positive experiences influence future buying decisions/buying preferences, aid in customer retention and happy users also end up becoming influencers or advocates for the brand. Modern organizations apply the Experience Design approach i.e., developing User Experience or UX centered around people’s experiences to ensure positive engagement with their buyers. Experience Design Experience design focuses on people’s experiences to streamline the design and features of products, processes, environments, and strategies. It focuses on customer needs, feelings, contexts, and mindsets to design the user experience. An experience design-driven approach allows every process and function to influence customers’ emotions, memories, and perceptions in a way that they find value in it. Each of these functions can thus become a revenue-generating piece in the customer journey. Ongoing interactions and feedback from customers and listening to their problems leads to pathbreaking ideas in the design thinking process. Key measures to designing a seamless Customer Experience Measure what matters to customers – Quantifying what matters to the customers is the most significant step. While designing experiences, the customer journey should be the crux of all development. They should not be made to repeatedly provide the same information. This is often the reason for apps and websites having high bounce rates. Above all, while designing the CX, to be truly effective, every step should involve testing and iterations and the data thus obtained can help in validating assumptions and figuring out preferences. Customers may be from demographically diverse backgrounds – Due consideration must be given to the fact that users may be demographically diverse, so the language and prompts should be simple and convenient for laypersons. Some may have cognitive, physical, visual, or auditory challenges, others may not comprehend complex workflows and language, quite a few may be seniors, and so on. User experience (UX) must be accessible, inclusive, and intuitive for all users. Choice of technology is important – Designing a great experience for customers involves not just designing super smooth workflows, navigation menus, search filters, payment, and checkout pages but the technology that all of it is based on, is equally important. While selecting the right technology, developers must keep in mind that it must be fast and efficient, should allow them the flexibility to design and build interactive features, and, enable data collection so that they can make informed decisions that are user-centric. Design and technology should be in sync to provide the best user experience. Creating prototypes then scaling Ongoing customer engagement in the form of real-world experiments with prototypes helps to test, learn and refine workflows and processes. The best way to reduce friction for users is to iteratively prototype and seek feedback from a representative sample of end-users during the design and development phase. This ultimately leads to better user engagement and allows to scale at very low risk. CX as a competitive advantage In summary, experience design facilitates an enjoyable customer experience and helps improve business performance. Earlier, design thinking as an approach was considered as a cost to the organization. But in the modern world, no matter how unique a product is, customers are kings and there are numerous alternatives available to them. Every minute detail can potentially influence customer satisfaction and may either lead to the churn of loyal customers or conversion of prospects to happy users. Venture7 opines that CX blends together user experience and customer service to build lasting relationships with customers. It brings forward a massive opportunity to have loyal customers and increase the Customer Lifetime Value. Therefore, a seamless customer experience can become a significant competitive advantage for all businesses.