Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]
How to Design a Breakthrough Customer Experience?
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The constant advancement in technology has raised the expectations of customers in terms of their interaction with companies. This digital disruption is also forcing businesses to develop new capabilities and explore innovative ways and means to deliver improved Customer Experiences.
Organizations can overhaul their Customer Journeys by embracing latest digital insights and practices. To develop a truly exceptional, breakthrough Customer Experience, organizations should work towards adopting 7 key imperatives:
- Develop Customer Empathy
- Design the Complete Customer Experience
- Reinvent the Customer Experience
- Lead the Way with Industry Rules
- Become an Agile Organization
- Continuously Improve and Iterate
- Foster a Culture of Collaboration
An organization does not need to execute all 7 of these imperatives—it varies from case to case depending on the circumstances, market, and customer requirements.
Let’s, now, discuss the first 4 imperatives in further detail.
Develop Customer Empathy
Many firms use surveys and face-to-face interviews to gather firsthand customer insights to enhance their Customer Experiences.
However, when designing Customer Journeys—in addition to customer data—companies need to understand their customers’ behaviors deeply and put themselves in their customers’ shoes. This entails knowing the complexities the customers face during various journeys and developing new ways to understand Customer Journeys—for instance, by making researchers accompany customers while shopping, by asking customers to report their activities and provide feedback as they interact with various offerings, and involving customers to provide their input on early versions of proposed offerings.
Design the Complete Customer Experience
Most people consider that design pertains only to good artwork, outlook, and appearance of products.
However, it involves not just the look and feel of a product but also the way it operates. To render breakthrough Customer Experience, companies need to fundamentally shift the way design is perceived—not just the user interface design rather designing the overall Customer Experience.
Great Customer Experience design encompasses crafting every interface the customers have with the provider from the minute they consider a purchase. It warrants enrolling all people that can make a difference to the customer (especially from the operations and IT units), mapping out customer touchpoints, and transforming fundamental systems and processes.
Reinvent the Customer Experience
Improving current Customer Journeys enables achieving incremental cost reductions and quality enhancements.
However, to improve Customer Journeys there is a need to shift the way Customer Journeys are perceived—from merely addressing the issues in a Customer Journey and streamlining a process to completely transforming the entire Customer Experience.
This should be done by carefully deliberating on and thoroughly analyzing all journeys from a customer’s perspective, drawing inspirations and studying benchmarks from other industries, and addressing customers’ needs.
Lead the Way with Industry Rules
Financial institutions are, to this day, quite cautious of utilizing technology to verify customers’ identification documents for deposit account opening. Compliance teams at these institutions often resist the efforts to transform customer account opening journeys, as they exercise extreme care to ensure regulatory compliance. Some banks make the customers fill their applications online but ask them to visit a branch with the completed paperwork, resulting in a cumbersome Customer Experience that is no longer acceptable as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Leading organizations strictly adhere to laws but demonstrate to the regulatory authorities how technology has helped them break the status quo surrounding regulatory compliance and develop innovative solutions to manage risks and compliance better.
Interested in learning more about the other imperatives key to developing a breakthrough Customer Experience? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Breakthrough Customer Experience (CX) here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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[NOTE: Our Design Thinking presentation has been trusted by an array of prestigious organizations, including industry leaders such as Apple, MIT, NASA, Ford, Boeing, Fujitsu, Syngenta, Palo Alto Networks, and Mercer, to name just a few.]
Design Thinking is [read more]
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In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.
Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.
Learn about our Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Best Practice Frameworks here.
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About Mark Bridges
Mark Bridges is a Senior Director of Strategy at Flevy. Flevy is your go-to resource for best practices in business management, covering management topics from Strategic Planning to Operational Excellence to Digital Transformation (view full list here). Learn how the Fortune 100 and global consulting firms do it. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by leveraging Flevy's library of best practice methodologies and templates. Prior to Flevy, Mark worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Co. and holds an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn here.
