Putting the Customer Experience at the centre of Design

Make it work before doing anything else

We have worked with a wide range of organisations to help them improve their customer experience for commercial, reputation and ethical benefit. We’ve written a few blogs to summarise what we’ve learnt and and the situations typically we face. Working with companies to put the customer at the centre of decision-making and design process is really about culture and the painful process of absorbing what customers really want, not what they would like to think they want. This then ensures resources are focused on the right things to achieve a clear goal.

The first thing to note is that customers just want the experience to work. We’ve been asking for 20 years how many organisations manage to do this. The consensus is that two-thirds struggle to this consistently year in, year out. When asked, customers normally say ‘surely you can do that’. The second point is that the experience is as important as the ‘thing’ that you are selling. Increasingly, it’s the experience that drives purchasing behaviour.

Many organisations have recognised that consumer behaviour is shifting away from simply buying ‘things’ and is moving more towards ‘experiences’.

Train operators recognise that in order to attract people away from cars they need to make the experience easy. This includes the ease of buying a ticket, punctuality, the likelihood of getting a seat, the degree of privacy and whether the train is clean. For many consumers these ‘hygiene’ factors are now a key determinant for purchase. Cafes provide another example; the sector is now seeing a ‘5th wave’ of evolution from high street chains with dull unchanging formats to ones focused on delivering a personalised service set in a more individual and distinctive setting.

Those organisations that are able to translate this ‘experience vision' into reality see long term benefits because not only is it difficult to achieve but it’s very difficult to copy. In commercial terms, research shows that companies that focus on the customer experience to drive their business planning grow between 4% and 8% above their market. This also strengthens brand loyalty by turning customers into advocates with lifetime values 6 to 14 times higher than detractors [1]. Pursuing this approach also reduces operational and capital expenditure.

We’ve found that if you put the customer at the centre of what you do, achieving efficiencies and increasing revenue tend to follow. If you ask customers, in the right way, they will highlight waste and identify where and how they want to purchase. Teasing this insight from consumers is the difficult part, and, whilst organisations have long recognised the importance of getting the experience right, few have been able to make it happen.

We know that listening to customers isn’t easy. But, we know that if you take the time and effort to get the information you need, and translate that into language that your business can use, your organisation can reap significant commercial benefits that will increase the long-term value of the investment. Now, surely, that’s worth doing.