While evolution is still (somehow) a divisive topic, what it has taught us is this – only the fittest shall survive. In the branding context, the adage ‘survival of the fittest’ shows that only those best equipped to bear down the fluctuations and challenges of shifting environments will be successful.

The good news is that unlike biological and human evolution, business evolution does not have to rely on lucky mutations. We can enable evolution leveraging technology – our secret (or rather, not so secret) weapon.

Then and now – the evolution of customer expectations

When we are talking about evolution how can we not talk about how customer relationships have evolved. We have come a long way from the time when the terms of customer relationships were dictated by the brands. It was all about pushing – push your fliers, emails, phone calls, voice mails, mailers, newsletters to the customer. The brand decided ‘hey, this is what I want the customer to know and hence I shall provide only this information’. But what did the customer want? This didn’t quite matter to most brands.

Today the story has flipped. The customer is front and center. The customer is in charge of how they want to interact with the brands, what they should talk about, and which channel is their preferred one. Everything must be personalized and contextualized and all these interactions have to take place at the right place, at the right moment and on a device of their choice. Seamless and cohesive with individualized touchpoints is the new mantra.

With digitization driving continuous disruption, it’s abundantly clear that customers want more than superior product features or functions. What they want more is great “service” –personalized, immediate, and convenient.

On the one hand. all this seems easy to provide owing to the plethora of technologies at our disposal. Yet, brands are failing to provide the elevated experience that the customer wants.

Customer Experience – What Customers Want

This could be attributed to the fact that even now brands are failing to recognize that the lines dividing products, services, and environments are continuously fading. Instead of focusing on creating only a stellar product, conscious design now needs to integrate all these elements and then identify the right combinations to create compelling customer experiences.

Take Tesla for example. They have a great product but how did they transform their customer experience? By simply opening their futuristic showrooms in malls and prime locations and designing an environment that helps the customer connect with their product.

What is evidently clear is that customer experience strategies can no longer be created in isolation. Your customer experience design can no longer just be dictated by the 4 Ps of marketing…because today, your competition is not just the organizations belonging to your industry. Your competition is everybody.

That is to say that my expectation as a customer from an airline will perhaps be the same as my expectation from Zappos. And while this might not seem like a fair comparison, it is how the playing field is today. The best way to identify how to deliver a great customer experience is to know what they ‘value’.

United Airlines did a great job of completely flipping their customer experience on its head when they were developing their Business Class product. Their initial focus was on designing a luxury experience. However, upon talking to their clients they discovered that luxury was not just the bells and whistles. Their customers were more interested in being rested and well-slept upon arrival. Rest trumped luxury and this led the airline to completely redesign their customer experience, including the pre-departure shenanigans. This change of strategy (among other things) helped United Airlines climb out of bankruptcy

Customer Experience does not come in a ‘one size fits all’ package

It is clear that customer experience too, much like everything else, does not come in a ‘one size fits all’ package.

You can have the most up-to-date technology in place, have the right product at the right price, and yet your customer experience could be poor. You could be doing everything that your competition or the market place is doing and still your customer experience might not work. This is so because customer experience is not just about touchpoints and journeys. It is about interactions and experiences with your product and service.

It makes sense for customer experience strategies to leverage the usual suspects (read, data, technology, etc.). But the strategy in itself has to emerge from understanding ‘who’ you are and what that represents to the customer. What naturally emerges from that understanding is ‘what’ the customer wants from you and ‘how’ do they want to engage with you. That drives an understanding of what they are trying to achieve by using your product or service. It helps identify the behaviors (both natural and constructed) that are connected to the buying experience. And it comes from constant introspection of the core of your brand and continuous assessment of how the customers relate to the product and the experience you are providing.

Technology has to complement the human element and not overshadow or replace it. Because today people don’t just buy a product. They buy into what the brand represents, the idea and the experience. And they expect this experience to be unique, original, and authentic.

 

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.