Customers don't become devoted to their favorite brands by accident. Their loyalty, the amount they're willing to spend and the likelihood they'll talk about a brand to their friends and family aren't just based on its products and services, either. A strong relationship between brands and customers is often an outcome of well-executed customer experience (CX) design. Designing the totality of the customer experience is increasingly important to company growth as customers enjoy greater choice than ever before.
What is CX design?
CX design is the strategy of optimizing customer experience at all touchpoints along the customer journey. It seeks to encompass every interaction between a customer and the business. In short, customer experience design seeks to ensure nothing is left to chance before, during and after the customer’s journey.
What are examples of CX design?
Organizations are increasingly seeking new ways to improve the customer journey. Here are a few examples:
- A streaming service that uses AI from social media sources to provide better recommendations of movies to watch.
- A retailer that sends a discount offer for your go-to sneakers before the latest pair even hits the stores.
- A bank that provides seamless client interactions by offering more customer options for communication such as text to agent, chat to agent, voice to text, while capturing customer sentiment throughout the customer journey.
How does UX design and CX design compare?
User experience (UX) design is primarily focused on the user, while customer experience design is focused on the customer. These are not always the same person.
UX design seeks to make both the products and the process of purchasing the products easy and valuable to use (for example, the user experience of a website). However, CX design goes further by recognizing that customers deserve to have their needs and desires met from the moment they first hear about a brand to long after a purchase is made.
How does customer experience design work?
Though the specific approach to customer experience design could vary from one organization to another, there are a few common best practices:
1. Researching customer wants and expectations
Successful brands have learned to listen to customers before creating an experience. Through market research such as surveys and customer interviews, they take the time to learn customers' pain points and their most aspirational desires. The products, the way they're marketed and how they're supported can then follow, creating a holistic and valuable experience for the customer.
2. Developing customer personas
Not everyone shops the same way. Some customers have specific requirements based on their age, budget, location or other criteria. That's why, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to customer experience design, many brands take the data they've gathered through research and segment it into multiple customer personas.
Personas are a way of categorizing the common attributes and behaviors of customers so that a brand can offer variations on experiences that will meet their expectations.
3. Drawing journey maps
Think of the difference between walking into a store and having to look around aimlessly for what you need versus a store where you're greeted with a smile and an offer to help from an associate. The latter journey is one where the design of the customer experience was mapped out, and the same thing can be done across digital experiences as well.
Journey mapping should cover all the key milestones that affect customer relationships, including marketing, sales and support. It should also take into account the myriad of touchpoints that customers might prefer to use as they reach those milestones, such as apps or live chat.
4. Evaluating and personalizing experiences
Customer experience design doesn't simply require data collection in the early stages. Brands should continue to gather it as the relationship develops. This might be as simple as offering a brief survey at the end of a contact center interaction or asking them to opt in to receive more specific product and service information.
Doing this well means brands can capture customer sentiment (such as whether or not they're satisfied). They can also become increasingly personalized and contextualized in how they engage with each customer moving forward, reaching out through a preferred channel about a new product the brand knows the customer will love.
What are the benefits of CX design?
Delivering a great experience to customers takes hard work. But it also offers an opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves from competitors and continuously improve their ability to reach business goals.
Here are a few other advantages:
- As CX design becomes more intentional, you will be able to more easily track metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer effort score and net promoter score.
- Improving loyalty through a better customer experience can have a significant impact on your bottom line results because a loyal customer can be more valuable than a new customer.
- You'll get the chance to drive additional revenue through repeat business, as well as cross-sell/upsell to customers based on their trust in your brand.
CX design can also be a way of streamlining and unifying operations within a business that are sometimes siloed. By orienting everything around the customer, it can be easier to develop shared goals and common practices that lead to greater alignment.
Rather than starting from scratch and doing everything themselves, successful brands have also learned to turn to trusted third parties with the right tools and expertise. Verizon's customer experience design team, for instance, has a proven track record in advising and documenting a CX strategy that uses best-in-class technology.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.