We now live in the Experience Age! Which means that you need to continuously improve your products and services to not only meet customer expectations, but to truly delight them. Here's our approach to designing delightful customer experiences.
“People don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole".
This quote holds the essence of the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, which states that your customers “hire” your products and services to get specific “jobs” done. Jobs, in this case, is a metaphor, representing your customers’ real needs.
While this seems obvious, very few companies use this “getting the job done” perspective to identify opportunities for innovation.
Your journey to building delightful experiences starts with understanding the real jobs your customers are trying to get done. We use customer discovery to go beyond the shiny “features” and “functions” in your products or services to uncover the outcomes your customers are trying to accomplish with those capabilities.
In this step, we create a Customer Journey Map, which shows the customer interactions from their point of view. This journey mapping spans activities across the complete life-cycle, from the time the customer becomes aware of your products and services, to buying them, and using them.
These interactions can be with your employee (e.g., a call-center representative) or a computer (e.g., an app, IVR system, etc.). The Customer Journey Map also captures additional details about your customers’ emotions at each step and their need for information, interaction or a transaction to assist them in that phase of their journey.
This is the first step in shifting the company ’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in.
Customer Journey Maps don’t show the backstage processes that go on in your organization to deliver the customer value proposition. That is captured in a Service Blueprint.
The Service Blueprint ties the frontstage actions to backstage processes, metrics, policies, and organizational structure.
The end result is a complete picture of how your organization delivers value to the customers, from their perspective.
This step helps uncover any gaps between your customers’ experience and internal operational processes.
Armed with insights about customer and internal operational perspective, we will facilitate a cross-functional team to come up with ideas that improve the overall customer experience. We start by asking the following questions:
Next, we’ll prioritize these ideas based on customer impact, business value, effort, cost, and risks to uncover the most important ideas to improve the overall customer experience.
The ideas generated in the previous step are fairly high-level/abstract and therefore it’s difficult to align everyone around them. For people to rally behind a solution idea, they need a more concrete representation. That’s where prototyping comes in.
For the high-priority ideas identified, we prototype solutions using the insights gained from previous steps. By making the ideas tangible, it helps us think through the viability and usability of the ideas before committing resources to build it.
At this stage, we aim for mid-level fidelity—it is high-level enough that it demonstrates only the key aspects of the solution ideas but more detailed than a wire-frame. In our experience, this prototype level is adequate for early-stage testing and learning the effectiveness of our solution ideas in improving desired outcomes.
It’s important to acknowledge that everything we have done so far is just hypotheses. We may have guessed the pain users (customers, employees, or partners) face and the ideas to solve their problems.
However, successful products and services cannot be built on guesses. So, what do we do? We seek validation from the only people whose opinion matters—your users.
The goal of usability testing is to ensure the solution ideas help users achieve their goals as efficiently as possible. We set up usability labs and observe users interacting with the prototypes to perform key activities. Our goal is to identify any friction between the users and the prototypes. Then we’ll rinse-and-repeat this process until we have an elegant solution that helps your users get their jobs done.
There you have it! That’s our approach to designing products and services that customers love. We hope you embrace the approach and win over your customers. All the best!
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