Customer Experience Strategy

Understand Your Customers

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE FRAMEWORK

“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.

Map the Front Stage Processes

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

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.

Map the Back Stage Processes

SERVICE BLUEPRINT

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.

Generate Ideas

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:

What can we do to eliminate or reduce the painful parts of the customer experience?
What can we do to enhance or create new experiences that will cement your brand positioning with customers?
What can we do to make the employee experience better, such that they can serve your customers most effectively?
Can technology play a role in making an action faster, less error-prone, or completed at a lower cost?

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.

Prototype Solutions

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.

Usability Testing

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.

Solutions

Services

How We Do It