Customer Experience Design Principles | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 10

Customer Experience Design Principles

Every time we interact with a customer it’s an opportunity to impress them. We want our customers to walk away excited and happy that they are in business with us. Regardless of if we are providing a service or product we need to be intentional when it comes to the user experience of our customers. We can do this by ensuring every touch point is carefully thought out to optimize their experience. 

Let’s start by thinking of our user experience from the receiving end.

We know we don’t like to sit on hold for long periods of time, it isn’t ideal when the site we were shopping on crashes, or when our delivery arrives a week late. We know what a bad user experience is and the emotions it creates and that is not what we want for our customers.

Creating Your Ideal User Experience

When starting the process we should make it clear what our mission is and how that mission is being reflected in the steps or touchpoints of our user experience.

“Is my mission aligned with what my user is experiencing during each interaction?”

And 

“Is my mission being portrayed on a daily basis?”

We need our customers to have a consistent experience that is in alignment with our mission and to do that we need to be intentional and optimizing in every interaction with our customer, no matter if the interaction is on our website, Instagram, or with a sales rep. 

To avoid creating a sub-optimal user experience we need to think as a new user, not from the top of the chain. We need to start from the first touch as if we are a user to find where any friction or misalignment is within the interaction process.

Once we’ve found the weak points we can then meet the user where they are, instead of forcing them to meet us where we are at, which leaves room for more innovative competition to step in. Because our job as business owners is to make it as easy as possible to work with us.

Reducing Friction

The entire point of doing the above exercise is to reduce the friction that the user experience has with the client. Friction would be any point where the customer experiences frustration, confusion, or simply takes too much time.

We want to stop having “Items left in the cart” for our business, which means we didn’t capture potential value. 

An example would be a person passing by our restaurant and deciding to eat at one down the street or a sales person who’s customer doesn’t go through with the entire process. Both potential values are uncaptured. 

Incredible User Experiences Create Longevity 

It is our job as business owners to make doing business with us a breeze. This isn’t just because we want to complete the current transaction with a customer. Having a great user experience will not only keep our customers coming back but it’s likely that they are going to tell their friends and the same is possible if our user experience sucks.

Word of mouth is similar in importance to ratings, a few five star ratings can be the difference in 20 people viewing your product or content to 200. Similar to good word of mouth could be the difference between having a fully booked restaurant or one struggling for customers.

We want to have a relationship with our customers long term, so it’s important that we know how we want our customers to feel at the end of our process.

“If this is the feeling or end that i want them to reach, how can I reverse engineer that” 

We think about how we want them to feel at the end of each interaction and then what we need to provide for them to start on the path to that feeling. And when we start with the end we have a chance to soften any friction that is unavoidable, like a delay in shipping time for a product. If it’s unavoidable then we need to put preparations in place to ensure that the user doesn’t turn sour on the product or service during their user experience. Softeners can be coupons, thank you messages, or just an alert using empathy for any delay. 

How To Put It Into Action

We need to create a system. A system is a set of policies, processes, and technology that aid the business to its goals. We need to think about how we can use these three things to elevate our user experience. 

A process might be sending a coupon when a customer’s order is delayed, a policy might be that every customer email is responded to within 24 hours, and a technology can have the information entered on your website by the customer be savable for their next time visiting and purchasing. 

The goal is to find ways to automate, design, and invent on a customer’s behalf to make their experience better. Customers want better even if they don’t know it. Even if it might cost a bit more, think of it less like an expense and instead an investment. 

Employee User Experience

We want our customers to be over the moon about doing business with us, and our employees to feel the same about working with us.

People should be put in a place where they feel they are working in their strong suit. When people are placed outside their genius it can lead to them feeling drained and as though what they are doing isn’t meaningful work. 

Our job as business owners is to find where people should be placed so they can feel fulfilled in their role. Because if they aren’t satisfied and happy they aren’t able to provide a great service to anyone else. Staff should be able to come to us with discontent, that means allowing time for review and being open to their input and potentially change. 

There shouldn’t be any unspoken topics that your team or staff is afraid to speak on.

We want our internal and external processes to be quick, easy, professional, and enjoyable if anyone is going to enjoy working with us. 

Here at Better Than Rich we avoid creating any suboptimal user experiences by creating over the moon emotions through systems including processes, policies, and technologies.