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Customer experience

Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. (source: Wikipedia)

Customer experience architecture

How about information architecture connected to experience architecture.

“Service providers are continually reshaping their offering in response to changing customer needs and demands. As customer expectations change, businesses need to rethink the experiences they deliver. Meeting new demands does not only require delivery of the right propositions – it also requires developing broader capabilities around the needs of people, across the entire ecosystem.”

Melvin Brand Flu a.k.a. /brandflu | @MelvinBF ~ Livework Studio

Omnichannel customer experiences: A new design challenge

Omnichannel requires omnidesign and omnidesigners. Such much for omni to do.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat experience design (The Netherlands) ~ “Forget native apps, forget responsive webdesign, and say hello to omnichannel. We have moved away from the design of a single application, product or service. Increasingly, organizations have to deal with a multitude of them. This evolution is triggered by technology and raises a number of issues, challenges, and problems. How can we create a ‘seamless’ experience between all of the channels? How can we always keep the customer at the center of the design? And are our tried and tested design methods good enough, or do we also need a new way of designing, so-called omnidesign, to meet omnichannel’s needs?”

(Jantine Geldof a.k.a. @JantineG ~ Informaat BiRDS on a W!RE)

Heading towards UX excellence: Challenges from the UX Management Roundtable

Or how the middle management of Enterprise UX deals with the wicked problems of the experience landscape.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat experience design (The Netherlands) ~ “There is a growing need for UX managers in many organizations. Employees in this new role are facing big and complex challenges. Informaat organizes on a regular basis sessions of the UX Management Roundtable. In these meetings challenges are addressed and discussed UX managers are facing. Conversations of the roundtable from the past two years have now been documented in a free white paper.”

(Susanne van Mulken, Rob van der Haar, and Peter J. Bogaards ~ Informaat BiRDS on a W!RE)

Good design drives shareholder value: 2014 design value index results and commentary

2015 version coming soon, because ‘the results are in’.

“The 2014 Design Value Index shows us for a second year that corporations that put an emphasis on design as a strategic asset perform significantly better than those that do not. As corporate design capabilities mature, executives are able to direct this power towards their companies’ most challenging problems. This, in turn, allows design-driven companies to grow faster, and often with higher margins, due to the exceptional customer experiences they are uniquely positioned to create. Key trends identified through this work include the rise of user-experience (UX) design as a sub-discipline whose growth is expected to outpace all other design disciplines as the number of digital interfaces expand and the significant investment in internal design capabilities under way in many large U.S. companies today, as we see from DVI companies Intuit and IBM .”

(Jeneanne Rae a.k.a. @JeneanneMRae ~ Design Management Institute)

Omni-colleagues: The new heroes of digital

Omni, inter, multi, trans, or ‘what-have-you’. All better than solo, single, mono or uni.

“The omni-channel approach runs the risk of ditching humans for automated touch points, but for digital to triumph, these services must be re-humanized. Companies need to strategically consider which services are appropriate to manage via machines, and which require human interaction.”

(Mark Curtis a.k.a. @FjordMark ~ Accenture Clicks)

All you need to know about Customer Journey Mapping

Is that all you need to know? How difficult can it be.

“Most organizations are reasonably good at gathering data on their users. But data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.”

(Paul Boag a.k.a. @boagworld ~ Smashing Magazine)

At the crossroads of chaos and calamity

See how IBM is revitalizing Design in its organization.

“In a 1966 memo to all IBM employees, then-Chairman and CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr. declared, Good design is good business. At that point in history, IBM used design to demystify technology when computing was new. Almost half a century later, IBM is using great design to create enterprise-class products that people love to use to get their work done. Scaling modern design across a portfolio of thousands of products that serve clients in more than 170 countries is much more than a two-pizza team challenge—and we like it that way.”

(Phil Gilbert a.k.a. @philgilbertsr ~ AIGA Gain conference 2014)

A new era for search: The zero moment-of-truth is now defined by shared customer experiences

Search and brand, the marketeers heaven. Find and experience, the designers heaven.

“Search is a natural step in the discovery process. In a web world, search engines offer a lens into a qualified and structured view to help online consumers focus and make informed decisions. With Google dominating search, marketers concentrated on improving search ranking through tried and true techniques to ensure that what they were marketing earned a coveted position in the likely search results a customer might consider clicking.”

(Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis)

Breaking up with the user in user experience strategy?

And all this because business has discovered experience as a significant and distinctive feature. Next, they’ll have to discover design.

“(…) many of the people attending CX conferences and subscribing to CX publications aren’t necessarily practitioners, but businesspeople whose organizations have, in some way, given them experience-related responsibilities and who must purchase consulting services to fulfill them. If we badge ourselves as strategists of any stripe in the field of experience, these are the people we need to be talking to.”

(Ronnie Battista ~ UXmatters)

Defining patient experience

Journal as a format. Online, public and to share.

“As patient experience continues to emerge as an area of research and practice in healthcare, the need for standard consistent definition becomes even more critical. Without a common foundation or at least a cornerstone on which to build or adapt, the efforts that follow are set on shaky ground. We offer these ideas not in the promotion of one idea over another, but in recognizing that in existing work and in the shared themes we uncovered there is a strong set of related concepts from which to grow. This will be critical to ensure patient experience remains a viable, respected, and highly embraced part of the healthcare conversation, as we believe it should.”

(Jason A. Wolf et al ~ Patient Experience Journal Volume 1Issue 1)

Bringing change to life

Design and designer as change agents, their best versions.

“Change in an organization is really hard. This is especially true when a company that was once on the forefront of innovation finds itself having lost that luster through its own growth and success. The last couple of years there has been a transformation happening at PayPal that is touching every part of the organization to make it innovative again. At the heart of this change is a new, close partnership between design and engineering. Can your organization be changed? From Bill’s experience at Yahoo!, Netflix, PayPal and consulting with numerous companies he believes there are some core principles you can employ to drive transformation that are all centered around the customer. The question Bill will explore is ‘How can design be the catalyst for that change?” While this talk will be inspirational, it will take an honest (and humorous) look at what has worked and what hasn’t worked so well in trying to scale change.”

(Bill Scott a.k.a. @billwscott ~ Adaptive Path‘s Managing Experience Conference 2014)

The customer experience obsession

Obsessed with customers, always good?

“Customer Experience is now accepted as a key driver for business growth, regardless of industry. This view is supported by research showing that customer experience leaders have significantly, consistently out-performed the S&P 500 in recent years — but understanding the value of customer experience and transcending engrained organizational processes that hinder it are different matters. Digital strategy has unleashed new, creative ways to engage customers throughout every step of their journey; it’s now time to consider the strategic role community plays in harnessing the value of digital interactions to inform long-term customer relationship and loyalty goals.”

(Wendy Lea a.k.a. @WendySLea ~ Adaptive Path‘s Managing Experience Conference 2014)

Telling stories: Mapping the patient experience at John Muir Health

PX (‘patient experience’) following close to CX (‘customer experience’). Upcoming new kid on the block soon, LX (‘learner experience’).

“For us this not only gave us an opportunity to leverage and diversify methods, like storytelling, to gather insights, but also brought us closer to the heart of the new face of healthcare, the patient.”

(Anel Muller ~ Adaptive Path)

The great convergence

Galaxies and Copernicus, doesn’t that ring a bell.

“So with three different starting points – UX from product development, service design from service delivery, and customer experience from marketing and customer support – we’ve all arrived at the same place: the realization that by consciously crafting the experiences people have with those products, services, or organizations, we can help those people be more successful and find more satisfaction. Oh yeah, and it’s good for business too.”

(Jesse James Garrett a.k.a. @jjg ~ Adaptive Path)

The shift: UX designers as business consultants

Will they then become CX consultants?

“UX is a broad field and designers are increasingly playing a strategic role in many companies. Be that designer. Businesses are increasingly adopting user-centered approaches to create experiences, moving UX design to be one of the core activities driving the company strategy and operations. This is an incredibly valuable opportunity that we designers can take to step up and contribute to create the great experiences and services they envision, taking our vision, tools and understanding to a different level. But we need to learn the new skills to play at this table, a table that’s often speaking a different language with a lot of politics and different stakeholders. This talk will cover exactly these extra skills that are required to make this strategic jump: understanding the business needs, educating the client, understanding the hidden request, managing the various party involved in a project, defining the right process, understanding the internal impact and more.”

(Davide Casali a.k.a. @Folletto ~ Interaction14 videos)