Customer experience and design: why it isn’t easy
Putting the customer experience at the heart of the design isn’t always easy
There are many reasons why organisations find it difficult to put the customer experience at the heart of the design, but in our experience three reasons stand out; recurring themes that we hear time and again.
Identifying Value. Many organisations are unable to identify what customers really value and convert that into language operators and design teams can understand and use. Too often projects follow the usual flow of tasks like customer journey mapping or customer insight analysis, but then fail to convert that into something useful. Furthermore, to recognise that the first and last parts of the experience are the most important. For example, one supermarket we worked with focused on the first 10 metres, a visitor attraction the first 100 metres and a premium airline the first 2 minutes. We worked with a private hospital provider to highlight that it was whilst talking with other patients in the waiting room that potential customers decided whether to have treatment; not with the consultant or in the contact centre. This is because the organisation assumed what customers wanted, but didn’t take the time to find out and know what they wanted. The organisation then sought to put the same investment into the waiting room as it had in the contact centre and consulting rooms.
“The National Trust is experiencing significant annual increases in its visitor numbers. How to manage this growth whilst maintaining the visitor experience, and protecting conservation, is a key issue for them.
We worked with the Trust to identify how investment could be more targeted to where it really added value for visitors. In particular, the welcome experience. We conducted proving trials to demonstrate that a doubling of visitors doesn’t always mean a building twice the size. ”
Once you know what customers want you can allocate resources in the right way, but most organisations fail to identify where this value is. This isn’t because they don’t want to, but because the leadership team fails to make sure that this step is properly undertaken. We find this with the vast majority of clients that we work with.
Cultural Alignment. It’s not always easy to build a coalition of stakeholders who accept and understand what needs to change and are committed to making it happen. Customers want the end-to-end experience to work, not just the bits that each individual organisation delivers. Customers frequently say: “surely you can all get together and figure this out”. Organisations have many different pressures and constraints on them and importantly, different ways of working - aligning these needs is key to encouraging collaboration around a common goal. Furthermore, improving the experience involves having a frank and transparent conversation about how the experience currently works. For many this can be a painful and sobering exercise. Leadership is invaluable to making this happen - being clear at the outset that honesty is more important than contractual obligations. Organisations will make no progress until this is done.
Business Benefits. The metrics and data around the customer experience are not always as tangible as those for finance or sales, for example, so demonstrating a clear link to the bottom line is more difficult. To succeed the benefits of changing the customer experience need to be clearly articulated and culturally accepted. We worked with one leading airline who knew there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to support the importance of experience but nothing concrete. However, one senior manager said to us “we’ve all got to the point where there’s no doubt that this works, everyone has accepted that now”. That’s the cultural acceptance that is needed.
Solving these problems isn’t easy and a robust programme of work will be required to make it happen. However, we need to remember that the customer is one of the few threads that truly unites any organisation. Even support functions like Finance and HR have a key role to play in improving the experience; focusing on the customer acts like ‘organisational glue’, driving the rationale for change and improved value.