As technology extends deeper into the marketplace, the ways in which your customers experience your company and its products continues to grow. Now, more than ever, ensuring a universal, consistent experience is delivered to your audience — no matter how individuals choose to interact with your brand — is critical to prospect conversion and customer retention.
What about your company? Do customers have the same positive experience across all of the touch points you offer? Are there blind spots or vulnerabilities that could leave your customers unsatisfied or, even worse, prompt them to tell others about their negative experience?
Enter experience design.
1. What is experience design? Experience design is the discipline around how a customer, employee, member, participant, sponsor, partner, vendor or user interacts with your company. Experience design considers all touch points and designs them to be as effective as possible. In the process, an individual’s relationship with a brand is constructed in a logical, thoughtful manner.
2. What might an experience design strategy recommend?
Through a user-centered design process, experience designers will develop a sophisticated sense of audience needs and drivers and identify what will cause them to continue to do business with your company. When that knowledge is fused with what your organization is trying to achieve, the implications to the experience become very clear.
As examples, consider the following business objectives and possible experience recommendations:
- Conversion: Deliver pointed, persuasive information at the right time to assist customers at various predictable steps in the decision-making process.
- Lead Generation: Introduce a "carrot" to the prospect while also setting appropriate expectations.
- Adoption/Utilization: Make the capabilities, value and output of the interaction immediately evident.
- Engagement: Find that one compelling feature that will get them coming back for more and prompt them to promote your offering to their network.
- Satisfaction/Retention: Map out primary user goals, connect them seamlessly and integrate them to an overarching workflow.
- Awareness/Traffic Increase: Move from dealing with incoming requests to a destination site and toward outreach via a coordinated digital communications strategy.
- Channel Migration: Enhance the awareness around, and ease of use for, the self-service channel.
- Internal Resource Optimization: Understand real workflows, integrate systems and optimize tools.
3. How will experience design affect customer service?
The experience your customer has with call center representatives is one of the most important touch points they have with your company. Data may be available from the customer’s other channel interactions, but is it being used? When associates are unaware of the full spectrum of interactions a customer has had with the company, they are unable to customize the call to meet the customer’s needs. Calls take longer, satisfaction is diminished and opportunities for additional sales are forfeited.
Today, call center systems increasingly surface information about a customer’s interactions with other channels. For example, if the customer had recently logged into the Web site, received a printed communication or e-mail, or made a purchase in the store, the information can be raised to the associate’s attention. This allows the associate to effectively assemble the customer’s profile and potential needs and cements the perception of your business as connected, informed and prepared to respond to the customer’s specific needs.
4. How can experience design be woven into your process?
Often there is great enthusiasm around harnessing the power of experience design, but a lack of clarity around how to begin. Powerful first steps include:
- Begin to organically form a multi-disciplinary "customer experience" team, with volunteers from sales, marketing, technology finance and operations.
- Ensure that you’re talking to your customers whenever possible and extending relevant learning throughout your organization.
- Make experience design a staff member’s responsibility or area of focus.
- Hire an experience design firm to build an internal governance strategy and process that you can "grow into" as a future approach.
- During your next design initiative for any channel, consider what could happen before or after a customer’s experience across other channels. Ask questions that drive thinking in that regard.
A focus on experience design can provide your company with the methodology, practice and approach for ensuring that all customer touch points to "hang together" in a manner that consistently provides value to your audience and maximizes customer conversion, retention and satisfaction.
By Amy Cueva, founder and chief experience officer with Mad*Pow Media Solutions.
May 28, 1:00 Eastern: Roundtable Debate: Extending the Benefits of Quality Management Solutions. Presented by CRMXchange. Quality management solutions have grown from basic recording and quality assurance applications to sophisticated contact center management suites, increasingly empowered by analytics. The trick is to implement and use them properly. To get full value from these suites, contact center managers must incorporate the applications’ new capabilities into their workflow and decision making processes.
June 3, 1:00 Eastern: Key Measurements for Corporate Growth. Presented by Calabrio. Join this webcast to learn what data is considered key to effective decision making at the senior level, tools that are needed to capture the appropriate information, and the processes that need to be in place to interpret such information?
June 4, 1:00 Eastern: Service Star. Presented by CRMXchange. Join this reality game show conducted via the web and broadcast to a worldwide audience. On June 4th, the first round of customer service teams will compete by responding to actual customer service scenarios in real time. The panel of judges and the web audience members will evaluate each response and provide a score for each team. Join the fun on June 4th, 11th, and 18th.
June 5, 1:00 Eastern: How To Measure And Manage Caller Experience. Presented by Avoke BBN. What exactly is Caller Experience? How is it different from existing metrics? How do you measure it and make it actionable? Learn about four caller experience metrics - and how they complement your current metrics.
June 10, 1:00 Eastern: How Forecasting the Right Things, Using the Right Forecast Metrics, and Using the Right Planning Process Will Improve Your Contact Center. Presented by Bay Bridge Decision Technologies. This webcast discusses the forecasting process and its relationship to the overall long-term planning process; issues with using standard measures of forecast error; and how forecasting the right things may even be more important than more accurately forecasting your call volumes.
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"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars."-- Unknown
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