How Experience Design Improves Customer Experience
This is the first blog in our series on Experience Design. This blog shines a light on Customer Experience, particularly its perception in a technical working environment.
Introduction
Sometimes in the industry, I notice that the term customer experience, or CX, is used as a purely technical term, which overshadows its non-technical, more human aspects. There are several definitions of this term, which showcase its complexity. The essence of every explanation is that customer experience is, basically, how the customer interacts with a business and what they get from it.
CX solutions are designed to improve customer experience, but what exactly is customer experience? Before designing an effective solution to resolve customer pain points, we first need to understand what ‘customer experience’ really means and the factors that we, as digital consultants, need to consider when approaching a challenge.
The Physical and the Digital
Customer experience in an e-commerce environment encompasses the entire buyer journey, starting from product manufacturing to customer satisfaction after the customer makes a purchase. To provide customers with the best experience, brands need to provide them with answers in a way that would appeal to their emotions as well. A product can be easily accessible but there is a high chance of a customer not being interested if they are unable to relate or develop a connection.
That does not mean we make the processes complicated. Seamless customer experience is to make it easier for customers to get what they need. Businesses need to adopt a human-centred approach instead of adopting a company-centric approach when building a solution to improve the customer experience.
A friendly web user interface is part of the customer journey and impacts how the buyer interacts with the business, but customer experience goes beyond that. An interface, be that of an app or website, that does not address customer pain points will inevitably result in a poor customer experience no matter how easy or fun it is to use. To provide a smooth experience to customers online, shopping portals should have four characteristics: speed, transparency, personalisation and consistency.
Approaching CX Solutions Through Design
In 2021, Gartner found that about 89% of businesses believed in competing on customer experience. The question is, were they successful? A study by Forrester earlier this year suggests that most of them weren’t. In 2022, about 20% of brands have seen a drop in customer experience quality.
To provide a well-rounded customer experience, companies need to walk alongside the customer every step of their journey. That will only be possible if the customer is at the centre of the strategies a business adopts to assist the buyer. So, when organisations implement a new technology to address their customers’ challenges, they need to reflect on the purpose it would serve and how it would help the buyer. Whether the solution is straightforward or complex should be dictated by the customer.
This is where Experience Design comes in. Jumping right to the solution without understanding the challenge, ideating and designing prototypes will be a fruitless effort as it won’t be focused on the customer and, therefore, less likely to contribute to improving the customer experience.
To build and implement an effective CX solution, the customer experience strategy should be aligned with the user experience (UX). There should be a focus on understanding user behaviour and pain points before moving on to adopting a strategy to address them.
Vigorous usability testing of prototypes based on user behaviour and business insights is also vital to arrive at a customer-first solution.
This is what FAIR’s design practice focuses on: improving customer experience by understanding pain points and using the right technology to resolve them.
Conclusion
If businesses truly want to offer their customers the best experience, they first need to understand them by utilising an experience design-led approach. A CX solution — no matter how sophisticated and innovative — can fail if it is not customer-centric. An all-rounded solution that leads to an improved customer experience can only be implemented if robust design practices are adopted, i.e., they involve real customers throughout the journey from the beginning, testing of designs (preferably early and often) and being prepared to make mistakes along the way (also known as ‘failing fast’).
Businesses should not stop at mapping out a design strategy. Every user has different needs and expectations and to meet them all and keep up with changing business environments, the design strategy needs to be revised regularly.
