KA-CHUNK!
When customer experience design fails and how to avoid it
Joel Flom
UX Australia 2009, Canberra
27 August 2009

Bit about me
HELLO...
- A designer
- 12 years experience
- Start-ups to SMEs to corporates
- Experience split between Australia and US
- Still figuring it out

Customer experience defined

Customer experience defined
“Customer experience refers to the totality
of experience a customer has with a
business, across all channels and
touchpoints.”
Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path

Customer experience defined
“Customer experience should encompass
every aspect of a company’s offering and
consistently engage a customer across all
touch points.”
Joel Flom, Elavision

Customer experience defined
BLUE SKIES, RIGHT?
- Unified vision
- Rallying point
- Plenty of success stories
(Apple, Amazon, Zappos)
- Required to stay competitive
- Customers demand it

Customer experience defined

Customer experience defined

Customer experience defined
BUT...
- Major challenges in creating an integrated
customer experience
- Organisational unity impossible to achieve
within timeframes
- Client not ready
- Customers misunderstood

Customer experience defined

Customer experience defined

Customer experience defined
SO WHO’S THE CULPRIT?
- Revisit our own perspective
- Empathise with the business
- Stop idolising the ideal customer

Revisit our own perspective

Revisit our own perspective
“...designers are very much focused on the
service interface (eg. interaction with the
service provider), so much that they don’t
notice what’s going on behind them.”
Marc Fonteijn, 31 Volts

Revisit our own perspective
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
- We’re often blinded by the lights coming off the
front-stage
- We seek the “ideal” customer
- We still get sucked into the medium

Revisit our own perspective
“WEB PLUS ONE” APPROACH
- “Multi-channel experiences” are often the web plus
one other channel
- Our vantage point is mainly from the web outwards
- We're still fixated on the shiny object
- Other core services get overlooked
Garrett, Jesse James (2009). “How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?”.
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/merholz/2009/07/how-integrated-are-your-custom.html

Revisit our own perspective
PROJECT-BASED UNDERSTANDING
- Look at customers, the business and technical
teams through narrow lenses
- Perspectives are stitched together based on project
objectives
- Business units aren’t necessarily seen as operating
outside the design problem

Revisit our own perspective
“[Design thinking] is a discipline that uses
the designer's sensibility and methods to
match people needs with what is
technologically feasible and what a viable
business strategy can convert into
customer value and market opportunity.”
Tim Brown, IDEO

Revisit our own perspective

Revisit our own perspective
360° design

Revisit our own perspective

Revisit our own perspective

Empathise with the business

Empathise with the business

Empathise with the business
“How did this happen? If I was running a company with the distinction
and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed -- no
ashamed -- to have a website with a customer experience as terrible
as the one you have now. How does your CEO, Gerard J. Arpey,
justify treating customers this way? Why does your board of directors
approve of this? Your website is abusive to your customers, it is
limiting your revenue possibilities, and it is permanently destroying the
brand and image of your company in the mind of every visitor.”
Dustin Curtis, dustoncurtis.com
Curtis, Dustin (2009). “Dear American Airlines”.
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

Empathise with the business

Empathise with the business
“You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only
takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you
demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part,
and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably
because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done
organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations
realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and
not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know
what it’s like.”
Mr X’s response, dustoncurtis.com
Mr. X (2009). “The Response”.
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

Empathise with the business
“To succeed on the Web we need to change
our mentality from seeing ourselves as a
master to seeing ourselves as
an apprentice.”
Gerry McGovern, gerrymcgovern.com

Empathise with the business
TOP-DOWN TO BOTTOM-UP IS HARD
- Many obstacles, from organisational structure to
company culture
- Management suspicious of perceived value/risks
- Demands a different mind-set than earlier IT
programs
- Invites all employees to the table

Empathise with the business
DECISION FACTORIES
- Decisions don’t get made
- Decisions appear to have been made, but then
fall apart
- Decisions get made, but follow-up isn’t timely
- Decisions get made, but they’re bad
Martin, Roger (2005). “Why Decisions Need Design”.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2005/id20050830_416439.htm

Empathise with the business
SILOS
- Rarely have incentives to coordinate their activities
- Often have stronger incentives to go own way
- Friction between silos can be systemic
- Clear division of labour (job titles with explicit set of
responsibilities)

Empathise with the business

Empathise with the business
MARKET MATURITY
- Determine which stage the organisation is in
Maturity Model
Stage 1: Technology
- Work out the competition’s level of maturity
Stage 2: Features
(not just features and functionality)
Stage 3: Experience
Stage 4: Commodity
- Look at level is across entire organisation, not just
current design problem
- Understand what it will take to transition to the
next stage
Spool, Jared (2009). “Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, Part 1”
http://www.uie.com/articles/derivingdesignstrategy/

Empathise with the business
MARKET MATURITY
- Determine which stage the organisation is in
- Work out the competition’s level of maturity
(not just features and functionality)
- Look at level is across entire organisation, not just
current design problem
- Understand what it will take to transition to the
next stage
Spool, Jared (2009). “Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, Part 1”
http://www.uie.com/articles/derivingdesignstrategy/

Empathise with the business

Stop idolising the ideal customer

Stop idolising the ideal customer
BETTER EXPERIENCES NOT REQUIRED
- Loyalty over time can breed inaction
- “The devil you know” phenomenon
- Experience is not front and centre
- Relationship not required

Stop idolising the ideal customer
“We don’t want interaction! We want to
minimise our interaction!”
Eric Reiss, FatDUX

Stop idolising the ideal customer
CUSTOMERS NOT ON A JOURNEY
- May interact with multiple touchpoints and series of
interactions over time, but don’t view it as an
“ecosystem”
- Often only a means to an end
- Not seeking rich interactions, but instead less
interactions

Stop idolising the ideal customer
CUSTOMER SERVICE = HUMAN TOUCH
- Human touch still trumps online help/support
- Phone continues to be top preference
- Most customers don’t believe technology has
improved customer service significantly
- Must move away from AVR mentality

Stop idolising the ideal customer
“Online, we don’t just see and read
about your brand.
We use it.”
Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

Stop idolising the ideal customer
WHEN ONLINE, IT’S THE CONTENT
- When online, customers predominantly interact with
content, not the business
- Useful, usable content
- Bridges the gap between audience needs and
business requirements

Stop idolising the ideal customer

Stop idolising the ideal customer

Conclusion
FINAL THOUGHTS...
- Ensure we get a complete picture of the customer
experience, not the one we yearn to see
- Be a student of the business
- Give the real customer what they need

Conclusion
“How we approach our work is often what
determines its outcome. The more it's
about us, the knowers or gurus or smarter-
than-thous, the less good the
experience we create.”
Mark Hurst, Creative Good

The End
THANK YOU
- Web: www.elavision.com
- Blog: elavision.typepad.com
- Email: joel.flom@elavision.com
- Twitter: @joelflom