You’ve probably heard that “experience is business.” It means that your business is not based just on a product or service. People buy a product or service experience from you, so, whatever that experience is, it is what you are selling. For these reasons, experience has become one of the crucial differentiators among different organizations’ offerings.  An excellent customer experience can bring substantial business value, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to duplicate.

Data from a study by McKinsey shows that, across industries, experience performance on customer journeys affects customer satisfaction more than performance on touchpoints. In other words, it’s not enough for companies to deliver a good website user experience, or a good mobile user experience because people may accomplish one goal using a variety of channels — all these experiences must work in sync to create a good journey experience, whatever mix of touchpoints and channels may be part of that journey.

Experience performance on customer journeys is also substantially more strongly correlated with top-level business outcomes like revenue, churn, and repeat purchases. For these reasons, designing entire journeys should be a priority when it comes to UX investment.

Many organizations have begun to understand the value of investing in the larger scopes of customer experience (CX). However, few organizations have committed to the operational change necessary to deliver on this vision, which requires a shift toward experience-driven and journey-focused operations. One reason for this lack of action is that journey-focused experience design can be quite a large undertaking and carries with it a lot of unknowns. It’s a strategic shift away from what most organizations are comfortable with — product- and channel-focused operations, which unfortunately result in fragmented customer journeys.

Explore the Opportunity Space

Whether your organization is ready to invest in transformative experience changes or you’re still working to convince stakeholders of the long-term business value of doing so, you can at least take the first step toward improved CX by exploring the opportunity space.

Longitudinal research to understand the current state of your customer journey is a valuable first step toward improved CX, no matter your current level of commitment. At minimum, it will give you the insight you need to identify opportunities for improvement. How you approach these opportunities can be as liberal as needed, to align with your organization’s readiness to change. Even more, this initial research will give you the objective evidence you need to forecast the potential business value gained from your recommended optimizations. Decision makers are driven by improving top-level business metrics, so identifying experience opportunities and communicating them in terms of business value is a tried and true way to get stakeholders on board. Below are 3 primary steps toward exploring the opportunity space:

  1. Select a key customer journey.  There are likely many customer journeys that you support. However, start with one journey. Consider which journey is key to your overall offerings and has large potential for improvement.
  2. Conduct longitudinal qualitative research.  Gather data to understand the current customer experience and identify opportunities for improvement.
  3. Create a customer-journey map.  Capture your findings with a journey map . This deliverable helps you communicate the experience and identified opportunities to stakeholders.

Once you’ve done the initial research, begin identifying opportunities and exploring potential solutions. However, before planning a detailed strategy, have at least a high-level understanding of what is achievable at your organization. What is achievable can be impacted by many factors, including:

  • The current state: What is the quality of the current journey experience?
  • Investment:  How much investment is your organization prepared to put toward improvement?
  • Organizational transformation: What level of operational change is your organization ready and committed to make to support the future state?
  • Risk tolerance: How much risk is the company willing to take on?
  • Unmet needs: What unmet needs exist in the market that can be addressed through experience design?
  • Competitive landscape: What is the potential for competitors to disrupt existing revenue streams?

Exploring these factors will help you determine the appropriate strategy for your experience-design efforts. 

Three Strategies for Experience Improvement

The improvement of your customer experience is an initiative that could be approached in various ways, from the most superficial to the most transformational, depending on your organization’s capabilities and strategic objective. 

An easy way to think about improving customer journeys is to liken the process to how you might improve and update a home or physical space. Do you refine, remodel, or rebuild?

Impact investment matrix
Three strategies for experience improvement require different amounts of investment and have different potential positive impact for both the business and its customers.

These approaches represent different visions for the future. The first approach, refine, is the most conservative option, whereas the last one, rebuild, is the most radical and perhaps the riskiest. There are two factors that are important to understand for each approach:

  • Investment: The time, money and effort required to achieve the goal
  • Impact: The potential value added for both the customer and the business

Refine: Low Investment, Low Impact

This approach is not unlike how you might upgrade your home by making many small adjustments to the existing space. Perhaps you refresh chipping paint and apply oil to the hinges of squeaky doors. 

Refining the customer experience means smoothing out the rough edges of the existing journey by chipping away at pain points in an iterative way, without any radical adjustments. The focus should be on identifying opportunities with simple low-investment solutions to improve the quality of the existing experience. 

With this approach, because the overall investment is relatively low, the solutions are less transformational. The opportunity for added value to customers and the business is also lower than with the other two approaches.

Refinement opportunities:

  • Address visual and brand inconsistencies between channel touchpoints
  • Ensure that messaging is consistent and meets information needs at each point in the journey.
  • Resolve interaction-level pain points.
  • Identify and address issues that result in support calls.
  • Address general inefficiencies throughout the customer journey.

Remodel: Medium Investment, Medium Impact

Not unlike how you might remodel an existing space to your needs, remodeling the customer experience entails reimagining the existing journey and making moderate adjustments to suit the customers’ needs. The focus should be on leveraging the core concepts of the existing journey, while changing components to create efficiencies and conveniences or introducing new ways to carry out tasks.

With this approach, because the overall investment is moderate and the solutions can be fairly transformational, it’s likely that the impact on the customer journey will not be just superficial. It will require operational and foundational changes within the organization to support them. However, the opportunity for added value to customers and the business is higher than with the former approach.

Remodel opportunities:

  • Introduce faster ways to complete tasks
  • Add transparency into the delivery of services
  • Introduce personalization into relevance-enhanced content and interactions
  • Be proactive: even after the customers reached their goal, offer additional touchpoints, services, content to enable users even further

Rebuild: High Investment, High Impact

Think of this approach like building your dream home from scratch — only, it’s about building a state-of-the-art dream experience for your customers. There are no constraints from the old home to hold you back, and you can reimagine the status quo to deliver something entirely new and amazing, giving customers something they didn’t know they needed.

Every year, new disruptor companies pop up and deliver an old service in an innovative, better way. They build an entirely new experience for consumers. Many times, these companies see unmet needs and tap these opportunities by leveraging changes in digital technology. Here are a few examples:

  • Casper Mattress one of the first bed-in-a-box companies, skips the middlemen and delivers the mattress to your door.
  • Rent the Runway reimagined how people could acquire clothes. Instead of shopping and purchasing from a traditional retail store, Rent the Runway lets customers rent clothes delivered right to their home through the mail. 
  • Lemonade insurance seeks to eliminate the conflict of interest between the insurer and the insured. Lemonade’s business model differs from that of typical insurance companies in that it keeps a flat 25% fee of a customer’s premium, while setting aside the remaining 75% to pay claims and purchase reinsurance. Unclaimed premiums go to a nonprofit of the user’s choosing in an annual giveback. Lemonade uses chatbots and mobile apps to deliver insurance policies and to handle claims and thus reduce costs.

Existing companies can also rebuild and innovate on their current experiences. However, it can be difficult to see the opportunities to rebuild when you're enjoying a stable revenue stream with an established offering. For those who might see the potential, it can be an expensive and risky endeavor into the unknown to depart from what’s working. Yet, the payoff can be large, solidifying your company as a major player in a new generation of business. Two examples of rebuilt experiences include:

  • DBS Bank, a national bank in Singapore, used financial technology (“fintech”) to expand its business model services globally. One of the keys to its success was leveraging new digital capabilities to create a digital banking platform that others could build and integrate into. It launched an application protocol interface (API) used by financial and retail partners to incorporate DBS’s capabilities into their systems behind the scenes, therefore eliminating the outside banking interactions between the bank and its traditional clients. 
  • Netflix started as a mail-order DVD-rental service, but wasted no time to move into streaming the content from the web. It used technical advances to rebuild newer and better experience offerings that eliminated the mail component.

The common thread in these disrupting experiences is the innovative use of new technologies to create an experience that wasn’t possible before. Instead of looking at digital as an addon to their existing business model, these brands reimagine and deliver entirely new platforms and business models to leverage the shift in technologies. They have identified new digital capabilities that can disrupt their business model and changed their model instead of forcing the technology into their existing offerings. Often, the old model holds back innovation and blends poorly with the new technology

With this approach, the overall investment is high, and the solutions are transformational for both customer and the organization. However, this approach has the highest potential for business impact.

Identify a Vision for the Future

To succeed in any experience design initiative, you must align your strategic objective with what is feasible and obtainable at your organization. Doing this requires you to understand not only where opportunities lie with your current customer experience, but also your organization’s capabilities and level of commitment toward investing in high-impact experience changes. 

Armed with this context, you can align on a strategy to improve your journey design. If you’re unsure which approach suits your organization best, you may need to explore and ideate around each approach. Then assess each potential future state against your organization’s capabilities.

 

References

McKinsey & Company, “From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do” (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do)