How to make quantum leaps with customer experience

Please leave your journey maps at the door.

Photo by Cam Adams on Unsplash

Every organisation worth their salt understands the value of customer centricity. But few truly deliver on this with standout customer experiences.

In many organisations customer experience (CX) is mired in a quest for neatness and seamlessness. Customer experience ambitions are submerged under highly-detailed journey maps and artefacts, created by template wielding experience designers.

A big part of the problem is the practice of experience design itself.

Discipline dependency
As a field experience design has flourished over the course of the last decade, successfully raising the profile and importance of design as a fundamental business discipline. But despite its value being well understood, there’s something of a schism between the practice and the quality of experiences that customers ultimately end up, well…experiencing.

Somehow process and outcome have become decoupled, driven in part by organisational demand for repeatable design approaches and a wider societal impetus to democratise design. But there’s a knock-on effect. By reducing design to ‘paint-by-number’ style methodologies, the potential for creative leaps is all but eliminated. Granted, experience design has become far more accessible (which is surely a good thing), but the tools and techniques have become a crutch — the be all and end all — for many practitioners and businesses.

Too many people have fallen head-over-heels in love with the process, treating the challenge of experience design as an entirely analytical one. A technical problem to be solved with a latticework of processes and frameworks. Anyone who deviates or fails to uphold protocol must be chastised:

“ Hey Bernard, can I share my idea for revamping our customer experience?”

“No. You’re doing CX wrong Martin. There shall be no ideas until we’ve populated every inch of our 12 foot journey map”

Fragmentation breeds incrementalism
Ironically, the way many organisations approach experience design is full of friction and fraught with fragmentation. The very antithesis of the seamless ideal that experience design upholds. As a result the fractured process has led to a propensity to focus on incremental gains.

This fragmentation presents in a number of ways. Some practitioners fail to go beyond the collation of customer insights, acting as the voice of the customer and not much else. Some go so far as to outsource empathy, employing the services of ‘design researchers’, presumably so they can focus more on stakeholder management. And down the line, the ‘hands-on’ designers end up pushing pixels in a vacuum, disconnected from the customer, the design research, and business objectives altogether.

By staying in narrow lanes and obsessing about artefacts over outcomes, it becomes hard to see the wood for the trees. Valuable experience improvements are undoubtedly still made, but they are likely small steps forward, rather than giant leaps.

Greatness or neatness?
The practice of CX design has somehow become a pursuit of the good rather than the great, of reasonable rather than memorable, of designing smooth transitions rather than spikes of excitement.

“In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put
the peaks in.”

― Chip Heath

Back in 2016, world-renowned designer John Maeda argued that great design is both the insanely radical and passionately incremental. There needs to be a balance. There’s clearly value in an iterative approach and I for one am still passionate about the craft. But I‘m also a big advocate for the insanely radical. I’ve long held the belief that we should strive for more ambition with CX — more greatness, less neatness.

Embrace the unknown
To achieve greatness, we must take the path less trodden. We must park process, disregard constraints and eschew conventions. We must put best practices and journey maps to one side, just for a moment, and allow ourselves to dream about possibilities.

By throwing off the comfort blanket, it forces us to improvise. Creative thinking must take precedent over critical thinking. Whilst this may feel uncomfortable, it helps us see the big picture and opens up the dance-floor to non-practitioners. With the right conditions, anyone can participate in radical ideation.

So how might we think differently when it comes to customer experiences?

Inspired by a thought experiment devised by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, we‘ve come up with a way for CX teams to dream bigger. The ingredients are simple; you need a diverse team brimming with optimism, a healthy disregard for practicalities, and a willingness to go on a journey into the unknown together.

Mix it all together into a mini method, and this is what you get:

1. Define the key moments
   One way to get your head around a complex experience is to boil it down into key moments. Think of the 2–3 pivotal interaction points between business and customer, ideally those where the risk of delivering a shitty experience and the opportunity to deliver a great experience hangs in the balance.
2. Design the worst experience possible
   Coming up with great ideas is really, really hard. But coming up with deliberately terrible ideas can be both cathartic and easy. Looking at each of your key moments, ask yourself ‘what would make this a truly awful experience for our prospects or customers?’ Capture as many specific ideas as you can, share with each other, affinity map them etc. (you know the drill).
3. Design the 5* star experience
   In exploring and unpicking the worst experience possible, you will learn a great deal about what might make a truly remarkable experience. Using the worst experience as your source of perverse inspiration, flip the negatives into positives and map out all the dimensions of a first-class experience.
4. Design the insanely radical experience
   If only designing great experiences was that easy. To uncover greatness, you’ll have to push things further. A lot further. Try to level-up each facet of your ‘5* star’ experience. Repeatedly ask yourself ‘what would make this even better?’. Keep levelling-up until you get to an uncomfortable realm of ridiculousness. Push it to the absolute extreme. The laws of physics should be your only constraint.
5. Bring the right amount of radical to life
   If you’ve played the game well, you should have a barrage of ideas for each moment, ranging from the prosaic to the absurd. Sift through these and agree how big your ambitions are. Then recompile the most appropriate ideas into a future CX vision for each moment. Make these tangible by sketching storyboards or specific interactions. Finally, zoom out and refine your overall experience vision to ensure it is compelling (and coherent) from moment-to-moment.

At Everyhow, we love this method so much we turned it into a gamified workshop called Quantum Leaps. We frame it as a CX ‘circuit breaker’, in the hope we can help teams break free from all the fiddly details, neat frameworks and anxiety-inducing constraints. If you‘re able to take a moment to reimagine your customer experience with unbridled optimism, maybe you can too.

Thanks for reading.

Paul@everyhow.com