QA #3: How can you deliver better experiences for clients?
We’re one week into the 100 Day Pop Up Carnival dedicated to experience strategy and fellow experience makers.
First things first:
- I have been asked to make a newsletter so that it’s more convenient than hopping from Medium to social media where I post stories for the Friday Fortune of Wheel events etc. Happy to oblige: click here to subscribe and get all the carnival content in one place, e.g. your inbox. As always, this is a very bootstrapped DIY challenge and I’m still finding my footing with the daily blogging and everything else (#okboomer) on top of working, so bear with me!
- “PREVIOUSLY…”: If you’re just landing here, my intention with this challenge is providing tips and advice from my own experience on actual questions you may have as an “experience maker” (broad term for whether you’re a UX designer, a marketing officer, an entrepreneur or a branding specialist). The idea is creating a small public repository, in a corner of the Internet, rather than keeping these individual conversations we all have at some point in our careers behind closed doors. I decided to blog (daily-ish) posts to that end here on Medium. Last week I answered questions from the UX side of things. These were recurrent questions I’ve seen at last year’s UXResearch conference: one was about transitioning from academia, the other was carrying out research in emerging markets, so check them out if you haven’t had the chance yet.
- Where’s the fun part? Because we all have plenty in our plates between COVID and WFH on our own, I’m doing a Friday Fortune of Wheel every Friday, mostly on LinkedIn and IG stories. So far on the last two, I hosted a very impromptu no-fuss work-along on Meet and a tarot reading for experience makers according to your job sign (if you missed that last one, fear not, you can get it at the end of this post).
“How is that 100 day thing useful?” some of you might still wonder. It actually neatly answers today’s question about delivering better experiences for clients 🤓
I started this to go back to my initial drive when I decided to start my own business. Over the last decade that I’ve been working, I’ve noticed two main issues in the industry, mostly in tech and in many other industries tbh. The carnival is a platform for me, a way to help individuals, while addressing head on these two bigger issues.
The first issue is bridging the gap between experts in the tech and creative industries, because they are often working in silos when making experiences for businesses.
A lot of times businesses can fall short when it comes to the experience they want to bring their clients not because of a lack of ideas or understanding but because the different parts (the products / services, the emails, the social media campaigns, the customer care, the IT side etc) and the people working on these different parts, don’t connect.
That’s a first issue I wanted to tackle because at the end of the day how can you deliver better experiences when you’re not helping the people, the experts working on it?
A lot of the time, I’ve noticed the same recurring problems in organizations: it’s about connecting the dots, working together with different departments and functions inside the business, sharing the same language, reminding yourself of the “big picture”, having a crossover method that can bring seamlessness and flow from the client’s perspective.
And issue #2 is knowing where to start because there are so many pieces coming together to create an experience. From your onboarding in an app or through your email sequences, to how your digital offer mirrors AND complements your physical touchpoints (stores for example) into one narrative and one journey, there are so many alleys and corners. You could enter customer experience or experience strategy from customer care, or your brand’s promise, or by understanding how your clients’ really use your products / services and the transformation they expect through choosing you specifically instead of your competitor...
It’s easy to get lost and sometimes it’s easier to just settle to “make it work”, each part in parallel of the other or roughly connected.
However, it’s infuriating not only because of the cost these gaps create, but mostly because there’s more potential value and growth in creating a global coherent synergistic experience rather than having parts that occasionally point to one another. I believe that when you’re practically working in this cross-functional and synergistic scope, of creating with others something that’s “bigger than the sum of the parts” (and not as a theoretical horizon), you get more purpose and value in your work and craft as an experience maker.
My “ulterior motive” with this 100 day window is effectively to tackle these two issues (cross-functional work and big picture customer experience or CX). So starting this week, I’m going to break down the way in which any business can assess and make their CX coherent and unique.
Why is it important to do CX that way? What’s the benefit?
One benefit is fostering long term loyal relationships with clients. Do I need to repeat the figures behind acquisition and retention cost and customer lifetime value ? Probably, but not today (I’ll just hint at them for now).
Second, it’s about how businesses can leverage experience as an asset, to get to a place where they no longer have to compete on price, novelty or ease of use because those things are replicable at best and temporary at worst. It’s like trying to constantly outrun others on their turf and that’s probably an unavoidable reality of business, but it doesn’t have to be a fatality much less your strategy.
Great service is a great starting point (and a difficult goal in itself), but at the end of the day the name of the game is differentiation and loyalty.
It’s constantly obsessing over:
- how to provide a different experience that’s highly specific,
- how to truly differentiate yourself
- AND how to make people CARE about you (which is the holy grail connection you want to create with your clients)?
Where to start ?
It’s a tall order, and it’s difficult to crack because it depends on so many factors. As I was saying though, I’m challenging myself over the next 90 day or so, to break it down through my own experience and lens. And how it might help others and experience makers borrow some parts to implement in their organization, in a way that’s actionable and logical.
Just a disclaimer here: my way is not THE way, (#mando) and I don’t have THE TRUTH.
My approach, (which I prefer calling experience strategy because customer experience is still synonymous with customer service) is based on my own experience as an in-betweener in the tech and creative industries, of bringing together the power of branding, creativity, copywriting, marketing with the experience design approach, being user-focused through an understanding of the clients’ reality, leveraging grounded and blended data, along with the opportunities of digital transformation.
In the end, yes CX is about taking a client from point A to B without too much friction in order to create a smooth transaction, making sure the customers needs are met. But it’s ALSO about fulfilling something more: a brand promise (could be educating your clients about skincare or about sustainable clothes), a transformation (could be elevating their fitness journey through empowerment), and giving them an extra experience layer that creates moments that are valuable for people.
This next level is something that a few businesses have achieved so far (from Peloton or Soul Cycle in fitness to DECIEM in skincare to name a few): it’s about creating the conditions for customers to have a valuable journey that’s only achievable through a specific relationship with a business or a brand.
Six pillars that you need to be mindful of when working on experience, whether or not it’s “your lane” or scope:
Practically speaking the first step is looking at the “experience as a whole” and watching it from a bird’s eye view, asking yourself:
- “Is it consistent?
- Does the journey flow?
- What journey am I taking my client on their first week post-purchase, their second, tenth use?
- How’s the narrative changing?
- Are their goals evolving?
- How do we contribute to their transformation, to their habits?”
You can also opt to enter the customer experience journey from 6 entry points :
- Creativity. That’s where we’re starting this week. TEASER: in practice it’s about switching from storytelling to world-building in order to nurture your relationship with the customers. It’s the glue that holds everything.
2. Then, there’s what I call the pop up effect (*WINK*) and comes from my days in viral marketing and communication. You can’t create experiences without communicating on a human level with people. And as it happens it’s paramount to know how to get people’s attention, how to bring a level of playfulness or curiosity in order to get noticed and create events to engage your audience, prospects and customers.
3. Customer care, erroneously called the “last mile”. That’s actually the first and last “line of defense”. But it doesn’t have to be a line of defense.
4. Cross-functional work: making sure people work well together (duh) and making it about synergies rather than silos. That one’s tricky, especially when you’re experiencing “scaling pains” and your business is growing.
5. The two other pillars are a bit more complex but they’re essential from a bigger business development and a user intelligence perspective. I’ll tell you more further down the line.
So that’s my way of working on experience strategy. The beauty of the challenge is opening the floor to get others to share their views, their pain points, their best practices, their own approach where they are, so that we can compare notes, experiment and find solutions in our work.
Maybe for some CX is and will always be 99% customer service, maybe for others it’s 50% about sharp copywriting and branding and 50% about data to create personalized funnels, etc etc. I’d be curious to hear what’s your ratio in comments 👇🏽👀
Thank you if you’ve made it through ! I don’t make short posts unless I’m under duress (or paid work). Have a great week and I’ll see you tomorrow for another question.
PS: as promised and if you missed last Friday’s Wheel of Fortune on social media, here’s your May tarot reading for your “experience maker” sign => click the form below to get some esoteric #MondayMotivation:
