Having worked with so many Fortune 500 companies in designing customer experiences, the one thing I have realized is that a UX strategy alone will not cut it in today’s phygital (physical + digital) age. Companies need unification across all their multiple customer channels and the ability to intelligently use data & insights to build on each interaction.
I recently interviewed Design heads from over 50 Fortune 500 Companies to understand their strategy toward CX. I have put together all my insights & learnings from those conversations here
While there are so many other points that my fellow CX practitioners can come up with, I merely offer these as a guideline (based on personal experience) for you to critically examine and see if they can be of value to you, in your specific business.
1. User Research — hit the road!
“User Research? Yes, let’s send out a survey to people” — this is the first reaction I get when bringing up a research topic with most organizations. While several companies have progressed to focused interactions with customers, most of these still happen in a ‘workshop setting’. Are user research workshops really that effective for empathy studying and discovering usability issues?
Think about it, you bring your users into a constrained, regulated environment which is not anything like ‘real life’. The outcome & insights you get may not be entirely ‘life like’ either.
User research, therefore, needs to shift from within research labs (and online video assessments) to real-world settings. We should be testing users in the very same situations where they would use your product. Only then can you effectively design for the multitude of ‘human emotions’ and ‘unexpected scenarios’ that are unlikely to ever show up in a workshop setting.
And the outcome will surprise you, for many a time, the answers to the user problems is NOT TECHNOLOGY. It could actually be much simpler — like a mindset shift or a process change.
Of-course, this redefinition of user research will need lot more time & effort. With ‘speed is the new cost’ for most businesses these days, a fine balance will have to struck between field research and workshops/surveys.
2. Unified Omni-channel experiences
A conversation that we often have with our partners tends to revolve around “How do we bring in consistency with our brand, across all channels and touch-points?”
While designing experiences for Fortune 500 companies, I have very often seen instances of this — a customer makes an online complaint for a specific problem; but when customer care is contacted, they have no clue that an online complaint was made. The field service support team is equally clueless. As a result, there is confusion and dissatisfaction all around.
The key here is in understanding that an omnichannel experience is not just about the channels, but your customers as a whole. It is about adding value at every single interaction and touch-point. Given how disjointed most large organizations are, one of my major tasks as a CX Architect is to act as bridge between the Product, Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Technology, and Experience teams.
Here’s how my team & I have helped businesses build integrated omni-channel experiences:
- Designed holistic service journeys that incorporate all the various touch-points for a customer — be it social media, events, hoardings, website, apps, digital ads, service support, sales, or product installation. It is imperative that the data collected at every single touch-point is shared across all departments. Also, every interaction should have clearly defined digital migration points so that a customer looks as his interactions as one continuous journey.
- Championed the transition from CRM to CDP (Customer Data Platform). This helps create individualized customer profiles based on their interactions with a brand or product. The real value of CDP emerges from giving you specific insights on customer behavior and usage that is actionable. While CDPs in most large organizations are used predominantly by the marketing teams, the insights from such tools should be shared across all departments.
- Streamlined the implementation of a robust IT architecture that can support such seamless omnichannel conversations. We have so very often seen companies experience a service breakdown due to legacy (or sub-standard) IT systems.
I feel that what customers are really looking for in any brand is speed of responsiveness, trust, transparency, empathy, and personal attention. Based on my estimates, more than 80% of customers today want to interact with brands across multiple channels — the choice of channel varying based on convenience and complexity.
3. Self Service
In today’s fast paced scenario, the concept of calling up service support is rapidly becoming archaic. No one wants to listen to an automated voice system, key in choices to endless options, and then wait an eternity for a service support executive to answer the phone.
While a lot of companies we are working with are tackling the problem by hiring more call service agents, it is a lot better, in the long term, to leverage technology to address scalability challenges, rather than relying on humans to quench the fire.
Customers today want self-service. Research indicates that 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative. Furthermore, 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, if it were available and tailored to their needs. Gartner estimates that, by 2030, a billion service tickets will be raised by bots alone.
AI is playing a significant role in this self-service transformation. While there is a challenge in humanizing bot interactions, the technology is improving with every passing day. Therefore, until such time when the bots take over (and no, we are not talking about a post-apocalyptic ‘Skynet’ world), it could be a good idea to work in a hybrid model where customers can switch to the ‘human mode’ if they aren’t satisfied with the bot interaction.
4. Ecosystem Designs
Customers do not use your product in isolation. There is a plethora of other products (both physical and digital) that are used along with your offerings. All of this has created a ‘mental model’ for your customers — they expect to find things in a certain way, move their fingers and arms in a certain manner, and performs actions in a pre-determined manner.
This brings us to the concept of a design system — a set of components and patterns that define the entire experience of your product. You want to ensure that your design system has enough individuality, while still being a synthetic part of the whole. No customer will want to switch mental models, especially not just for your product. We need to be sensitive to the limits of ‘human cognitive workload’ and build accordingly (think Effective User Research).
For instance, one of our smart building customers wanted all their enterprise UI screens designed using Microsoft’s fluent design system. Come to think of it, this makes sense. If an enterprise is comfortable in the Microsoft ecosystem, it is only natural that they would want all their applications to have a similar look and feel. Not having to give a second thought to how controls and interaction elements would ultimately work in an application will only save time for employees and have a positive impact on the bottom-line.
5. Dare to do something different
“Yes, that is a good idea but let us play it safe. Customers understand this task flow so let us stick to it” — this is the kind of conversations I hear so often.
Companies seem to be so comfortable with the existing mental model of their customers, that they just do not want to try anything disruptive. What they need to wake up to is that market dynamics and customer expectations are constantly evolving, and so should their approach to mental models. It is essential to remember that CX is a journey and not a destination, where it is quite alright to try new things and ‘fail-fast,’ rather than not attempt anything new at all.
While this might seem to contradict my earlier point on ecosystem designs, the key here is to strike a right balance between the new and the old ways.
6. Realize that experience is a balance between design, performance & functionality
The one thing I experience in almost every project is the divergence between the product, design, and development teams. Each have their point-of-view and simply cannot understand why their counterparts ‘don’t get it’.
Very often, these conflicts have to be resolved by senior management, who bring in their own biases. For instance, a product or digital head who is very performance driven will compromise on design to ensure that the product performance is top notch. There are other senior management leaders who love design so much that they will compromise on some of the back-end performance metrics.
Companies therefore need to understand that experience is always about striking a balance between design, performance, and functionality. There are more than a thousand trade-off decisions that need to be taken across the experience lifecycle of a product.
How can one strike the right balance? Get your customers to tell you that — let CX decisions be data driven (based on actual customer usage analytics), rather than hierarchy or competition-induced decisions.
7. Design System and Low/No Design Platforms
As product and software development cycles get shorter, so should design cycles. Once an initial design language has been defined, about 80% of new design flows have reusable components. Yet, in so many projects I have worked on, almost every new design flow is built manually from scratch. This does not just create too many dependencies, but is also painfully slow, cumbersome, and costly.
As a first step, businesses need to invest in creating a design system. And no, a design system is not just about colors. It covers every aspect of your visual, aural, and written communication. When this design system is created and packaged into a plug-in which your designers can use, it rapidly speeds up the design process. So many tasks which were mundane earlier can now be automated, and basic screens can be aligned for production in a matter of minutes. Designers don’t need to spend time creating icons or menus. Inserting content for self-help sections or pop-up menus becomes seamless, once the right content style guide is in place.
Building on this, businesses can look to create what are now called low/no design platforms. The way I visualize this is that any product manager with little or no design knowledge could login to a design tool and punch in the necessary technical data for creating a fresh product flow. And in just a matter of minutes, the design tool will automatically generate designs for the entire product flow, based on the design language defined by the creative teams. These workflows can then be quickly checked by the design team and sent to development for production. As a direct result, the man-hours spent in conversations and handovers between product and design, and then design and development, can be eliminated.
Don’t get me wrong — I am not suggesting that designers will have very little to do. As fresh end-user mental models & research insights come in, workflows and design languages will have to be modified — this is a continuous process. What low/no design platforms can do is to free up a lot of your operational time and help designers and product teams focus on the critical tasks at hand.
8. Importance of domain in CX
This is a question I get asked in almost every meeting — “Do your designers understand our industry? Have they worked on a similar product before?”
Until a couple of years back, my response would always be: “Designer’s don’t need domain understanding! It is the process we pride ourselves in, and this process can be applied to any industry.”
However, the more I closely understand the intricate complexities and large ecosystems around business enterprises, the more I am inclined to believe that this may not always be the case.
As an example, a CX specialist who has worked only in e-commerce applications, simply cannot be plugged into designing experiences for the O&G industry. The market dynamics, user mental model, environment, regulatory constraints, and ecosystems are every different in these two scenarios.
CX is about compassion — having an appreciation of how your end-users think, approach challenges, act under pressure, collaborate with other partners — in addition to the multitude of privacy, security, corporate governance, and regulatory constraints imposed upon them. And compassion cannot be practiced unless a CX specialist spends significant time understanding the complex dynamics in an industry. A basic level of domain learning is therefore a must-have for a CX practitioner.
To reiterate, these are my personal views based on experiences of working on multiple CX engagements. Customer expectations evolve so fast that what is applicable today might become completely obsolete in a matter of months. The best approach therefore is to quickly learn and ‘unlearn’ — letting data & real customer insights guide your opinions.
Moving on, I have also penned down my thoughts on the various process changes a large business can bring about, in order to build an effective CX Strategy. You can read all about it in my follow-up article “Building Your CX Strategy: An 8 Point Compass for Success.”
