The 4 Areas for Transforming Customer Experience

A unified brand experience is bigger than the sum of its parts …

Where do you start in taking a customer-first approach to digital business transformation? We’ve already addressed the pivotal importance of customer empathy in building deeper insights into customer needs, wants and expectations; understanding the end-benefits your customers are looking for and how they expect their needs to be fulfilled. Customer experience is measured by the sum of all the interactions customers have with your brand, from the core product experience to how they are being serviced and engaged throughout their lifecycle, both directly and indirectly. Your brand promise comes to live across all these moments of truth.

Customer experience (CX) requires design, a deliberate and thoughtful approach in architecting and connecting the experience your customers have across all touch points with your product, service or brand. In transforming customer experience and leveraging digital to create a more seamless, personalized and mutually profitable brand relationship, the design effort can be broken down in 4 distinct but related areas.

The 4 focus areas for CX transformation are:
1. The core product/service experience — how digital can enhance the experience your customers have in consuming or using your core product or service.
2. The extended product/service experience — thinking customer end-benefit, how can you leverage digital to extend the total solution you are offering and provide a more seamless experience from the get-go.
3. The lifecycle engagement experience — how you can engage your customers in a more connected and personalized way across the entire product or brand lifecycle, taking a digital-first and omni-channel perspective.
4. The extended market experience — how digital can help you extend your core assets and capabilities to new markets and new customer experiences.

This is early, draft thinking around how to tackle the CX elephant, so likely the framework will evolve and refine once properly tested and validated. I will add more detail and context to each of the 4 transformation areas in subsequent posts, but for now would love your comments and feedback.