Fostering Better Business with Customer-Focused Design
Organizations that truly care about their customers create engaging experiences and connections, differentiating themselves and lifting a weight off their customers’ shoulders.
Regardless of how the technological world changes, organizations that thrive will always consider the lives and emotions of their customers, employees and partners. Often referred to as “the experience economy,” this way of seeing the world not only combines physical, digital and emotional worlds, but evolves to meet our connective needs as technology enables us more and more. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn are digital platforms, but the human experience of social connection, recognition and community lead their success.
Prioritizing emotion
Organizations that build on human needs and respond to customers with innovation and value often reap the rewards. Customer experience encompasses understanding of behavior, emotions, memories and the value for the customer that is created with each interaction. Successful organizations transform themselves to be customer-led through building connections to customers, providing information about their experiences and enabling employees to work together.
The power of orchestration
Creating engagement between a human and an organization has become an established discipline with its own frameworks for transformative change. It’s about coordinating and optimizing the experience across all the ways customers and brands interact and meeting the customer’s functional and emotional needs. Organizations that achieve this create experiences that keep us coming back, referring our friends and family and sharing on social media.
In our hyper-connected age, building the right bridges to what a customer is trying to achieve is key. Consumers want to expend less effort, save more time and have proactive interactions in real time. In the future, customer-led digital transformation should aim to fully leverage the possibilities and opportunities of new technologies in faster, more innovative ways.
Designing change
End-to-end customer experience optimization, formal change plans, the creation and practice of human-centered design, agility and innovation, are key drivers of transformation. Customer-led transformation means the experience starts with understanding the customer — what they do, what they value, what they want to achieve. It enables that understanding through any channel by building deep emotional connections with customers. It’s the art and science of blending both basic needs — wanting to buy something — and emotional needs — wanting to be successful — that is most powerful.
Community focus
All leaders and employees have key roles in transforming their organization’s customer experience. This means fostering new skills, challenging paradigms, shifting cultures and newly defining value in human lives. Starting with designing for human needs and creating positive emotions means we can understand how to design relevant and engaging experiences in a rapidly changing market. The only differentiation is now the customer experience.
“Customer-led transformation means the experience starts with understanding the customer…”