Customer experience design
Customer experience design is about innovating meanings to the company’s offering and designing and managing customer encounters in a way that supports the creation of those meanings. Understanding meanings and systematically developing encounters is a fast way to create both top-line and bottom-line impact.
A customer experience is always subjective. A customer experience is dependent on a variety of elements such as the significance of the situation, context (time and place, physical space, social networks), client history and state of mind. A customer is not a passive recipient of information, product or service but an active player who creates structure to his or her world by relating objects and experiences to a framework formed by earlier experiences. Customers seek to create meanings, i.e. to connect discrete things and experiences into entities where they become understandable and relevant. Meanings are created to structure and simplify daily routines as well as to stimulate life and avoid boredom. A customer creates meanings by learning how a company can offer support in the every-day life and how it can help in achieving one’s goals. A company can support its customers’ meaning creation and learning through various elements, such as feelings (themes, metaphors, plots, analogies, rewards, surprises, design), thoughts (manuscripts, value propositions, references) and actions (trials, beta-testing, and user cooperation).
A customer experience can be managed in contexts and encounters. First and foremost it is important for a company to set goals for each customer encounter: what should the customer feel, think and do in a specific encounter? In our connected economy it is not possible for companies to choose the encounters and contexts in which they meet their customer. Nevertheless, they can aim at being present in the most important contexts and plan them in a way that the encounters support the customer’s meaning creation and learning. Since it is not feasible to invest in every encounter with same intensity, companies should identify the contexts and encounters that have the highest potential to create meanings.
Co-creation of meanings. Innovating experiences requires a new kind of thinking. Instead of merely selling products or services, companies should transform themselves into co-creators of meaning. Meanings relate to the deeper functions and values that a product or service has for the customer in different contexts. In addition to offering “wow- experiences”, companies should also aim at helping customers to deal with pragmatic everyday issues. This requires a deep understanding of the customers’ everyday practices as well as of the products’ and services’ use-value. This view also challenges current product tree structures and industry boundaries, as companies need to accept that it is hard, if not impossible, for one single company to have ownership of a total customer experience. Hence, managing the partner network becomes essential and the key partner in this network as a co-creator of experiences is the customer herself.
Promises management is a tool for customer experience management. A promise make a customer experience concrete for both the customers and the personnel. It reveals what kind of service can be expected and even what kind of meanings could be created. Hence, companies should concentrate on identifying the promises they give both implicitly and explicitly as companies always give promises on their services, regardless of being in writing or not. Most customer disappointments occur when a company gives unrealistic or unclear promises, forgets to adjust the promises to business model changes, fails to transfer the promises to the customer encounter or does not advise personnel how to fulfil the promises. Fulfilling customer promises requires systematic development, training, monitoring and ability to react to changes.
Vectia helps companies in designing and managing customer experiences with:
- Creating insight on customer’s practices
- Mapping contexts and encounters that have potential for creating meanings
- Assessing current customer experience
- Designing encounters, service processes and work practices in order to deliver the desired customer experience
- Setting up customer experience design metrics and management system
Success stories:
- Veikkaus: Designing customer experiences is no lottery, Explore Autumn 2009
- CEM Consortium, Autumn 2009
Studies and presentations