Customer Experience and Design: the key to success
To conclude this series of blog, we are looking the success of keeping a focus on customer experience throughout the design process and the benefits this has for everyone. Just like following a map, a clear design process with strong leaders will lead everyone to the final destination, saving time and money on the way.
How to achieve success
In our experience there are three key things that an organisation needs to address to achieve success. These should be included in any project:
Customer Experience Advocate & Sponsor. One team or person should be appointed to lead the customer experience work on behalf of all stakeholders, to build the dynamics and depth of relationships, and foster trust and transparency. The advocate should establish common ground, priorities, hierarchies, identify opportunities for alignment across stakeholders, and understand how issues can be resolved. They should also establish clear metrics and be able to articulate what success looks like. The person can change during the design cycle as ‘the problem’ shifts from one function to another but the role must remain throughout the life of the project. Often this role is about managing behavioural attitudes and keeping the organisation focused on the vision and not deviating from it as budgets change and people move roles. People often say: “Surely, someone’s done this?” This role makes sure someone has.
Align priorities, collaborate and build trust. Creating a single vision for the customer experience that aligns stakeholders behind an integrated experience that customers really want is key. It sounds easy but it can take time to develop and bring people on side. Finding out what the customer wants isn’t usually the difficult bit - making it happen is. However, without it, any solution will be suboptimal. Building trust and understanding between organisations isn’t always easy. It requires patience and investment as each sees the experience from a different angle. A design lead we worked with commented: “What to do isn’t the problem - it’s how it do it that’s the difficult bit - the task of translating and sifting customer and operator requirements into language the design teams can use to add value”.
Create a common brief. Creating a customer and benefits-driven brief to articulate the future operating vision for the building and how it will deliver more value for all customers, operators and other stakeholders is crucial. Effectively the question you have to ask is “How’s the building going to work?” The challenge is to work out how customers, operators and stakeholders work and to articulate the benefits of doing it better than it’s done now. Top down meets bottom up. To do this you have to “start with the end in mind” .
Unfortunately, many operators just want to “do it as they do it now”, transferring what they know to a new building and not using it as an opportunity to improve. As one operator put it to us: “it’s been working this well for years…what’s wrong with it…why change it?”
The brief itself needs to be ambitious and describe how the experience could work better. It also needs to provide clarity and focus for the design team to reduce “design cul-de-sacs” and provide a common vision to communicate what the project is trying to achieve. It should answer common questions that often remain unresolved such as customer flow, orientation, the location of the entrances, the shape and size of the cafes, welcome areas, operational areas, and the retail and specialist areas like security and collaboration spaces. Optimising these areas is what it’s all about. Customers don’t want complicated systems, processes or environments. They just want an experience that delivers on the brand promise.
Some expect the Project Manager to do this but typically they’re focused on structure and getting everyone into negotiating contracts. Many clients have told us that they lack an incentive to "switch the light on” and address underlying problems because it’s not in their self-interest to do so; kicking problems further down the line. So, what about other specialities like architects and engineers? Because most contractors derive their income from fees there is a cultural push to “just get going” before the brief is nailed down. Indeed, many benefit from an ambiguous brief. Some leave the project before the building gets completed which makes it difficult for them to own the business benefits. How often during the design process have you heard someone say “can someone go and dig-out the brief”.
A benefits-centric brief gets around these problems by being specific about what the building has to do and how it will work. But, it requires a team with the necessary soft skills and business benefits understanding to draw it together.