Successful Customer Experiences Start with Strategy

(This is a continuation of “Think Customer Experience, Not Design”)

Creating a digital customer experience is a balancing act that requires careful orchestration It needs to facilitate the customer’s next action. It needs to proactively steer the customer to their objective. It needs to allow for the changing desires of both the typical and the atypical customers. In short, a customer experience needs to thoroughly understand its constituent’s goals, needs, and behaviors. And the balancing part: it needs to be consistent with a long term brand, while supporting corporate objectives – and often be profitable.

Creating experiences requires critical strategic thinking, fostered by brainstorming options and prioritizing them based upon precise analysis and validation.

The opportunities are vast. An experience can be simple and elegant if appropriate, or it can help change an industry by being disruptive. Successful disruptive sites vary from:

• Ultrasimplicity: stripping away features to better meet the needs of customers.
• Online infusion: integrating online features into core offerings.
• Service infusion: integrating service features into core offerings.
• Service amplification: investing in distinctly high levels of service.
• Value repositioning: offering a radically different value proposition. [Source: “Five Disruptive Customer Experience Strategies,” Forrester Research, Inc., December 2, 2006]

Which is the right disruptive opportunity for your business? This is a strategic question.

Other experiences benefit from new technologies, often in the form of rich Internet applications RIAs). The investment for these new technologies can cost “less than $50,000 for small in-page applications to more than $500,000 for complex configurators”. The problem, “making a quantifiable business case is hard”. [Source: “The Business Case For Rich Internet Applications”, Forrester Research, Inc., March 12, 2007]

What new technology will enhance brand and provide competitive advantage vs. what is simply “cool” with limited results? This is a strategic question.

The Strategic Process

Strategy is a rigorous process requiring executive participation and cross-functional insight from multiple departments. Utilizing a robust mixture of workshops, interviews, data analysis, and strategic insight, a cohesive roadmap can be defined. The high level steps include outlining objectives, conducing research, and prioritizing opportunities. A high-level synopsis of the process follows:

Outline objectives

Interviewing stakeholders: The process needs to start out by interviewing key business stakeholders. Executives need to give their input on their overall objectives, concerns, and goals, and provide the opportunity to brainstorm.

Access past research: Companies usually have a plethora of usable research from past initiatives. Information from quantitative and qualitative studies, along with web log files provides insight into user base, corporate objectives, and provides information into past projects. By ignoring this data, time and money will be wasted.

Without this foundational step, an initiative will not have executive buy-in, will lose focus, and will be inconsistent with corporate objectives.

Conduct research

Qualitative and quantitative research: Stakeholders’ insight, qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys are used to segment constituents that demonstrate similar goals, needs and behaviors – called personas. Personas are used throughout the entire site creation process, and help prioritize functionality and roll out requests.

Without diligently conducting this research, and simply using “standard market data”, a generic experience will be created – one that won’t talk to the client’s brand, will not differentiate, and will not meet the customer’s expectations.

Evaluate and prioritize opportunities

The personas that represent the target audience will define key objectives of the experiences and functionality needs. Research will also show the expected result of implementing the initiative – measured in dollars and loyalty. Using data obtained in the stakeholder interviews, paired up with implementation experience, investment criteria can be obtained – resulting in a detailed roadmap complete with return on investment.

This step is the link between “an interesting experience” and “business value”. It shows the rollout plan, the reasons for investment, and the expected results. It is based on detailed research and is fact based.

These steps are essential to creating a compelling customer experience – one that drives adoption and across a broad set of customers in a profitable manner. How has your company developed their strategy? I look forward to responses and feedback at eric.karofsky@molecular.com.