Author: Mike Henry

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and providing them with a great experience can lead to increased loyalty, higher satisfaction, and improved brand reputation. It’s simple: every company needs customers, but what happens when there are so many brands to choose from? How can brands stand out? The customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Great customer experience doesn’t just happen as soon as you send out a survey; it needs to be planned and designed purposefully. 

In this article, we’ll discuss what designing an effective customer experience looks like, what makes it different from user experience and customer service, why it matters, the elements of customer experience design, and how to design a great customer experience from start to finish.

What Is Customer Experience Design? 

To start, what is customer experience? Customer experience is every interaction your customers have with your company at any point. That experience affects how they view your organization and products, as well as their loyalty. Customer experience design is the process of creating the customer experience at all touchpoints, from the initial discovery phase through to the post-purchase phase. It’s what your company does to ensure a positive customer experience across all stages of the customer journey. 

The goal of customer experience design is to create a positive, memorable experience for customers that meets their needs, exceeds their expectations, and strengthens their relationship with the brand. It’s a way to move your customers through their journey while actively working to make that a smooth and easy process. Customer experience design involves a multidisciplinary approach, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and user experience (UX) design.

A great customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer satisfaction, improved brand reputation, increased revenue, and a competitive advantage. So focusing on customer experience design is a way to actively work toward creating that great customer experience and helping your company benefit from it. 

Customer Experience vs. User Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer experience is often confused with other similar terms. While customer experience, user experience, and customer service are related, they are not the same thing and should not be discussed interchangeably. Understanding the differences between these concepts is crucial to creating a great customer experience. So, let’s dive into the differences. 

Customer Experience

The customer experience encompasses the customer’s experience with the overall brand at all touchpoints before and after purchase. It includes all interactions with the brand, including marketing, sales, customer service, and post-purchase interactions. It’s every ad, every social media post or comment, every article that a customer reads, and much more. It’s even walking past your storefront or coming across your website. The goal of customer experience is to create a positive, memorable experience that will ultimately strengthen the relationship between a customer and your brand.

User Experience

User experience (UX) is specific to the experience of navigation, usability, and interface design of a specific product or service. It focuses on the user’s interactions with a product or service, including how easy it is to use, how it looks, and how it feels. Basically, it’s your customer’s experience with your product. 

Customer Service

Customer service is the experience that customers have with your representatives about products or services. It includes interactions with customer service representatives, returns, and warranty claims. Again, customer service is a piece of the larger picture of your customer’s experience with your brand. Good customer service is crucial for creating a great overall customer experience because it helps customers feel valued and supported even after the purchase is complete and when something goes wrong. 

Benefits of a Great Customer Experience Design 

Let’s take a closer look at all of the benefits of dedicating time and effort to designing a great customer experience. A great customer experience design can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including:

Increased Customer Loyalty & Retention

A great customer experience design can create a strong emotional connection between a customer and your brand, leading to increased customer loyalty. Essentially, if your company can develop a real relationship with customers, they will continue to come back again and again. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your brand to others, and provide positive reviews and feedback. Plus loyal customers are what makes running a business so rewarding. 

Higher Customer Satisfaction

A great customer experience design can lead to higher customer satisfaction, as customers feel that their needs and expectations are being met. Higher customer satisfaction can lead to increased revenue and improved brand reputation. Plus you get the satisfaction of creating something that benefits people. 

Improved Brand Reputation

When you provide a great experience for your customers, they’re going to spread the word. Satisfied customers are more likely to provide positive reviews and feedback, as well as recommend your brand to their friends. So if your customers have a great experience with you, that’s what your company will be known for. 

Increased Revenue

A great customer experience design can lead to increased revenue. It’s a simple formula: satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. This leads to more revenue for your company. Increased revenue can lead to business growth in the long run and help you have the opportunity to continue to provide excellent products and experiences.

Competitive Advantage

A great customer experience design can provide a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. There are so many brands for everything, but companies that provide a good experience are where people want to go. Customers are more likely to choose a brand that provides a great experience over a brand that does not. So to stand out and be chosen above a competitor, provide a great experience for your customers. 

Elements of Customer Experience Design

Customer experience is so important, but what makes up the process of designing CX? These are the most common elements of customer experience design that are important to consider when crafting an excellent CX. 

User Research

User research is the process of gathering information about customers to better understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. To understand how to provide a good experience for your customers, you need to understand who your customers are, what their problems are, and how to solve them. User research can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and usability testing. 

Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is the process of mapping out the customer’s journey from initial discovery to post-purchase interactions. It’s about knowing where your customers start and what leads them to an eventual purchase. It helps your company understand the customer’s perspective and identify any pain points that might hinder the journey. Journey mapping can be used to create a customer experience that meets the needs of the customer at every touchpoint.

Visual Design and UX

Visual design includes the look and feel of the product or service, including branding, colors, and typography. UX design focuses on the usability and functionality of the product or service, including navigation, information architecture, and interaction design. Visual design and UX design work together to create a seamless, enjoyable customer experience. When visual design and UX are prioritized, your company can create a website and products that are easy to use, meet customer needs, and provide customers with a great experience. 

Designing a Great Customer Experience from Start to Finish

With those elements in mind, let’s look at the steps to designing a great customer experience, from start to finish. 

Discovery Phase

The discovery phase involves identifying customer needs and understanding their behavior and expectations. This phase is when you utilize user research, market research, and analysis of customer data. It’s important to develop a deep understanding of who your customers are, their current journey, their pain points, and any areas for improvement when designing your customer experience. 

Definition Phase

With a clear understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to define what success looks like. The definition phase involves defining goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your customer experience design. The definition phase helps ensure that your customer experience design is aligned with your overall business goals and customer needs.

Design Phase

The design phase involves creating a blueprint for your customer experience. You’ve come up with great ideas for what your customers truly need (hopefully revealed in the discovery phase), and you know what success looks like (thanks to the definition phase), so now you can make a plan for how to get from A to Z. You might prototype, test, and refine the design based on research and goals. The goal of the design phase is to create a customer experience design that works when you put it into action. 

Development Phase

The development phase involves bringing the customer experience design to life. You get to take your blueprint and make it into the actual experience for your customers. This phase can include developing necessary systems, processes, and tools to support the customer experience design. 

Deployment Phase

Once you have a developed plan, you can put it into action. The deployment phase involves launching the customer experience design. This phase can include training employees, communicating with customers, and ensuring that everything is working as intended. Now your customers will get to experience a deepened relationship with your brand. 

Continuous Improvement

Simply executing a plan does not mean that your work is done. The continuous improvement phase involves monitoring, evaluating, and improving your customer experience design. You can seek out customer feedback and make any needed changes. The goal of the continuous improvement phase is to ensure that the customer experience design is always improving and meeting the real needs of your customers.

Design a Great Customer Experience With InMoment

The InMoment XI Platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services that allow businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback in real time. Businesses can use these tools to do necessary research about their customers and to evaluate CX design and work toward continuous improvement. 

InMoment’s solution is also valuable when developing your CX design. InMoment provides businesses with actionable insights that can be used to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, design, and test new customer experiences, and measure the impact of changes on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

In addition to its platform, InMoment offers expert consulting and professional services to help businesses develop and implement effective customer experience strategies that align with their business goals and customer needs. InMoment’s team of experts can provide guidance on user research, journey mapping, visual design, UX design, and more.

Final Thoughts

A great customer experience design is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. In today’s competitive landscape, simply having an exceptional product may no longer be enough to win over customers. By designing a great customer experience, businesses can increase customer loyalty, improve brand reputation, and increase revenue. Designing a great customer experience involves multiple elements, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and UX design—and it is a step-by-step process that includes multiple phases.

By using InMoment’s platform and services, businesses can create a great customer experience that meets the needs of their target audience and aligns with their business goals. InMoment can help businesses stay ahead of the competition by providing real-time feedback and insights that can be used to continuously improve the customer experience. Get started with InMoment to begin designing a great customer experience. 

Read a blog by Phil Sager, Expert Partner and Daniel Moellerhenn, Expert Partner, Bain & Company, speakers at the XI Forum in Cologne on June 13 & 14

Reports of record inflation, ongoing labor constraints, rising capital costs, and other macro trends are ongoing and have compounded in unique ways. As in previous cycles of historical uncertainty and downturns, these increased headwinds across the globe mean customers and companies are behaving differently.

So, how can CX leaders and their teams best navigate customer experience in such challenging times?

We’ll explore below how to prioritize customers and strategically use customer experience tools to drive growth for your business and keep on course.

Understand the Landscape

As outlined in Bain’s The New Recession Playbook, a successful approach to strategy during a downturn requires businesses to:

1. Have a realistic assessment of your company’s starting point. Establish a clear understanding of your current strategic position and financial strength in relation to your peers and competitors. From this viewpoint, you can more easily strategize and weigh the types of risks your company can handle.
2. Be aware that, historically, downturns provide an opportunity for more dramatic gains and losses. In this moment, it’s vital to follow a decisive strategy, as the consequences will have long-term impacts on your business, talent, and customers. Those with a successful approach can end up stronger than before the downturn.

Take a Human-Centric Approach

How does recession strategy talk translate into CX planning and approach?

Customer experts Phil Sager and Daniel Möllerhenn suggest strategically doubling down on customers & employees. You can strengthen your experience management efforts by understanding your customer segments and taking special action to better serve those populations.

In one segmentation use case, a major Retailer Co leveraged existing capabilities and assigned unique Guest IDs to consistently collect detailed data on customers. They were then able to provide specific coupons and product suggestions, even leveraging life events (i.e. expecting parents, new college students) to provide an ecosystem of products at specific points in those customer journeys.

In another example, a major Asia-Pacific Telecom Co utilized segmentation to align their growth strategy with changing customer needs and, as a result, exceeded revenue goals and cemented their leadership in the industry.

From a recent survey of CX leaders conducted at Bain, we learned that while 61% of respondents have existing segmentation that drives action toward different customer segments, the majority of those same leaders do not use segmentation data strategically to buffer the negative impacts of budget cuts. In less-turbulent times, segmentation provides potential opportunity for growth, but in today’s challenging climate, it’s a necessity to strengthen your position and better connect with your customers.

How can you make better trade-offs using segmentation?

Strategic Use of Customer Segmentation

This demonstrates an important opportunity to strategically use customer segmentation to make informed trade-offs, especially in challenging times, to buffer budget cuts, potential downsizing, and other factors outside of the control of CX teams.

Segmentation will help you zero in on the best ways to provide for and delight your customers and with a tailored approach, lean into specific areas to drive customer retention and customer loyalty to weather the storm, earning growth in the short and long term for your business.

Our experts have compiled actionable ideas below to help companies prioritize customers and strengthen their customer experience strategy:

Provide For Your Customers 

Where can you deliver a stellar customer journey point?

• Offer unique services on top of products that service the customer’s greater overall need
• Remove junk / nuisance fees from the equation
• Understand the emotions of your customers and build responses in kind

Inspire Your Teams

Invest in a culture that empowers teams to continuously improve and work toward a common purpose.

• Equip your front line employees and customer service representatives (CSRs) with proper product, procedures, and communication for supporting customers in challenging situations
• Deepen their customer connections / distil a clearer voice of the customer
• Invest in your current employees to create future leaders
• If applicable, clarify expectations around hybrid / work-from-home (WFH) models

Activate Your Promoters 

Their customer value increases exponentially over time.

• Find the right implementation of referral programs to reward promoters and grow your base
• Provide loyalty programs that enhance customer experiences in a meaningful way
• Improve communications with customers – timely responses over preferred service channels

Your Customer Experience Strategy Going Forward 

In conclusion, navigating turbulent times requires a human-centric approach that prioritizes customers and employees. Customer segmentation is an effective tool for understanding customer needs and taking action to better serve specific segments. By leveraging segmentation, companies can make informed trade-offs, buffer budget cuts, and drive growth in the short and long term. To strengthen their customer experience strategy, companies should focus on providing stellar customer journeys, inspiring their teams, and activating their promoters. By adopting these strategies, CX leaders can steer their businesses through challenging times and emerge stronger on the other side.

Q2 Product Enhancements

InMoment announced today new innovative capabilities in the award-winning XI Platform for clients around the globe. This release of enhancements builds on InMoment’s integrated CX approach and AI-powered product foundation to give organizations the best chance of competing in today’s changing business environment.

Below you’ll find the latest innovations to: 

• Summarize customer feedback more effectively to save time and resources
• Improve the closed-loop service experience to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value
• Infuse feedback into enterprise systems to save time and resource expense
• Elevate your CX programs and the teams that drive them to create program efficiency and a quicker time to value

“We’re proud of our innovative and aggressive product cadence to deliver innovation and product enhancements into the market regularly,” said Sandeep Garg, Chief Product Officer at InMoment. “We believe it is important to continually enhance products alongside introducing new innovative solutions that benefit our clients and the goals they are trying to achieve to improve their customers’ experiences.”

If you’re a client and want to talk to someone about the updates to the XI Platform, contact your account rep. If you simply want to learn more about our innovative products and services, a representative can answer your questions by completing the form below, and we’ll get right back to you.

Product Enhancements to Increase the Business Value of CX Initiatives Include the Ability to:

Summarize Customer Feedback More Effectively to Drive Focused Action

First-of-its-kind technology–Smart Summary Generator powered by Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology, intelligently transforms feedback into easily consumable short, structured paragraphs. to surface the most important topics and trends to help organizations take immediate action on their customer feedback. What’s so exciting about this technology is it reduces the time spent analyzing and helps immediately summarize key themes and topics, making it easier for businesses to get to the root cause quickly. Read the press release about this innovation and other exciting AI capabilities that help save a ton of team time and resources by summarizing customer feedback more efficiently. 

Improve the Closed-Loop Service Experience

We’ve made major UI upgrades and introduced additional features to increase the performance of case management systems. Organizations can now also include employee insights that describe the moods of the employee and the customer at the case close (the person who called into the call center and you resolved their issue). There is also the capability to use closed-loop data for reporting alongside operational data to get additional insights about the customer and their experience. This allows teams to use customer case data to dig deeper into segments and geographies, enabling a better understanding of what to take action on to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

Drive CX Program Engagement by Infusing Feedback into Enterprise Systems 

We often mention integrated CX and the ability to integrate different systems, feedback channels, and key insights that lead to action as key contributors to the success we see our clients have when it comes to understanding their customers. With that in mind, we’ve made major updates to our workflow application to easily export text analytics data and send it directly into BI tools. It allows users, like analysts or researchers, the ability to pivot on data from tags to mine data and find insights that no one else can find in their BI tools of choice. This gives business analysts the flexibility and control over data analysis, which saves time and resource costs by minimizing the need for manual or scripted analysis. This process is critical to helping organizations identify trends and actionable insights more quickly, regardless of the data source or language.

Elevate CX Programs and the Professionals that Drive Them

InMoment and NPSx by Bain & Company have entered an exclusive strategic partnership to continue our efforts in alleviating the angst organizations are having as they struggle to understand where to begin when setting up a CX program or how they can evolve their program’s maturity level. Our joint expertise helps organizations understand how to assess current CX capabilities and how to create and execute successful CX strategies and initiatives to improve program efficiency and quicker time to CX value. NPSx Bain is also an expert in training and certifications with accreditation for CX professionals and practitioners to enhance their expertise around the latest customer experience and NPS prowess or training and certification to stay current with industry best practices, develop new skills, and advance careers. 

These enhancements and more, including 26 new language capabilities added to the platform, have been designed to help our clients summarize and leverage customer feedback more efficiently, identify how to take targeted action on closed-loop feedback, leverage AI to intelligently transform feedback into easily consumable paragraphs to understand themes, and export text analytics to current BI tools. 

To learn more about the latest product innovations and enhancements, you can find additional detail on the web pages linked above or check out the release notes here! 

In March, I spoke at InMoment’s XI Forum Sydney, and it shouldn’t surprise you that I chose to talk about building a customer experience (CX) program! In the spirit of sharing insights for those who couldn’t attend or want to revisit my key points, I’m here on the InMoment blog to briefly recap my presentation!

When I started working at InMoment, I knew nothing about CX. I didn’t know what a closed-loop system was and certainly didn’t know the difference between the inner and outer loop.

So at the recommendation of my supervisor, I read two books that you’re probably familiar with: The Ultimate Question 2.0 and Outside In.

I started to understand customer experience. NPS made sense. The case studies in the books made sense. And using customer experience to drive business outcomes felt common sense.

However, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that our leadership team asked me to lead the effort to rethink and revamp our CX program: Elevate. Here’s my story of going from a CX newbie to turning Elevate into an award-winning program in 365 days. And I entirely attribute it to the three tips below!

In the post below, I’ll cover these three practical, simple, and impactful tips to turn your CX efforts into award-winning programs.

Tip #1: Stop Doing Things That Don’t Work

My first tip is “stop doing things that don’t work.” While you likely know what’s not working in your program, here are some red flags: low response rates, high drop-off rates, homogenous responses (i.e., only hearing from one type of customer), or a lack of actionable insights. Sometimes surveys are not the proper listening methodology for a given touchpoint.

Here’s an example:

Previously, we sent a post-sales survey to buyers after our sales team closed a deal. This is a critical touchpoint to understanding the buying process and competitive landscape. However, we received fewer than 20 responses from hundreds of invites yearly.

Everyone knows the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” right? Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then in the world of CX, a customer conversation is worth a thousand surveys. As companies move toward more automated, impersonal interactions, I’d argue that live customer interviews are more important than ever.

So, instead of trying to increase survey response rate, we realized we were using the wrong listening method at this key touchpoint. We scraped the after-sales survey completely and doubled down on doing live Buyer Interviews.

We found that many customers would rather spend 30 minutes live on Zoom with us than two minutes completing a survey. We upload our interview transcripts and summaries to our XI platform for tagging and analysis—and the insights are invaluable.

Maybe you can’t conduct customer interviews, but I bet you have existing customer conversations in the form of call and chat transcripts, social reviews, or email support.

If something’s not working, try something new! Although there are best practices in CX, you know your business and your customers best. You need to do what works for you.

Tip #2: Listen With Purpose

No CX leader intends to ignore customer feedback. But too often, we launch surveys—or other customer listening posts—without purpose. Every customer feedback data source should have a clearly defined purpose, owner, and governance (i.e., a way to analyze the data, identify insights, and take action based on the themes).

Otherwise, customer feedback goes into a bottomless pit… and eventually, you’ll stop receiving it.

Sandeep Garg, our Chief Product Officer, is the most customer-centric product leader I have ever worked with. He is committed to ensuring the InMoment solution works for every single customer and that we continue to innovate to meet the emerging needs of our customers. And there’s no better way to achieve that than through customer feedback.

Sandeep and his team receive and review every piece of customer feedback, whether it’s a survey from our current customers, in-platform user feedback, or the Buyer Interviews I mentioned previously. He cares deeply about every nuance of the platform and ensuring it meets customer needs.

Here’s an example:

On February 1st, we received feedback from a customer. They were mostly happy, but the feedback contained a specific qualm about the platform. Sandeep received and triaged the feedback; by the next day, his team had resolved the issue for the customer.

The response from the customer: I wish I had given feedback sooner!

That’s what listening with purpose looks like. And when customers know you’re not only listening but taking immediate action, they’re more likely to give feedback repeatedly!

Tip #3: Always Be Celebrating

I saved my final topic for last: celebrating employees, as I call it, “Always Be Celebrating.”

Our Relationship survey asks, “Has any individual or team at InMoment gone above and beyond to ensure your success?” When we were revamping the Elevate Relationship survey, I knew I wanted to include this question, but I had no idea how much of an impact it would have.

We call this “Above & Beyond,” and it’s become a key metric for account health, customer satisfaction, and employee performance. We know that when an Above & Beyond employee is recognized, NPS is 5x higher. So while we’re primarily a technology company, our customer-centricity drives loyalty and continued value.

Whenever a customer calls out an individual, we pipe that comment into Slack and tag the employee. We also recognize Above & Beyond employees at:

• Company All-Hands Meetings
• Weekly Company Emails
• Moments Boards in Conference Rooms
• Our Mobile Application

Through this process, we’ve also identified the DNA of Above & Beyond employees, which we use for hiring, coaching, and training. And all of this results in highly effective employees that know how to meet customer needs!

Wrapping Up

Taking your experience program from the early stages to “award-winning” doesn’t have to be complex or require massive investment. Simply reframe your mindset and implement these three practical tips to build a program that customers, employees, and even executives love.